RedHat 7.1 s390x execution problem

Hi,
      I have a very unusual problem that has me flummoxed. We have one
particular server with a mounted filesystem that corresponds to a R/W disk
with in the VM hypervisor. The filesystem have been installed with a number
of "ELF 32-bit MSB executable" files and all files have had chmod 777
applied, including all directories up to the mount point. If I attempt
execution of one of these files as root there is no problem, if as another
user I get "Permission denied". I cannot think what this issue is here, any
ideas? Note that I can write into the file system as an ordinary user, and
a test bash script executes as an ordinary user as well.

John P Taylor