Oireachtas Joint and Select Committees

Thursday, 1 October 2015

Public Accounts Committee

National Asset Management Agency: Financial Statements 2014 (Resumed)

10:00 am

Mr. Frank Daly:

No, it is not. Generally one goes through a process of seven, eight, nine, maybe more, maybe fewer, at the first stage.

One would get indicative bids in the first round and then go into a second round when one might choose two, three or four bids to go ahead. It is not unusual that there would be only two or three are left in a process. The important thing is that one has two bidders who are independent of each other. There is no suggestion that they were not - two bidders aware of the reserve price, one coming in above it and one coming in below. There would be many other asset sales across the world where that would not be unusual. We did not, by the way, just continue. It is kind of implied that PIMCO exited and then, without consideration or anything like that, we ploughed ahead. We did not. We took account of the PIMCO exit but we also took advice from Lazard to see whether there was still competitive tension and whether we still had a chance to get our reserve price and, if so, to go with it. That is not at all to address the opportunity cost of not going down that road.

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