Oireachtas Joint and Select Committees

Thursday, 29 September 2016

Public Accounts Committee

Special Report No. 94 of the Comptroller and Auditor General: National Asset Management Agency Sale of Project Eagle

9:00 am

Mr. Brendan McDonagh:

There is, because Project Eagle has 56 debtors, so if we divide 56 into 2,800 we get about 50 documents per debtor on average. If we look at Project Arrow, there are approximately 22,000 documents and 300 debtors so there are approximately 70 documents per debtor. There is an important point I need to make. There was a change in the loan sale market in late 2014 and 2015. Bidders said they were spending a load of money on bidding on portfolios, not just with NAMA but with everybody else, and there is only one winner. They said that to reduce bid costs sellers of portfolios had to put more data into the data room. It was not NAMA that decided this; this is the way the loan sales market developed. As part of this, additional documents had to be put into the data room about, as I said in answer to the previous question, engagement with the debtors, what type the debtors were, had the debtors met their milestones or were they missing milestones. These were the extra documents which went in, and this had changed between the time Project Eagle was on the market and Project Arrow was on the market. Another fundamental difference which happened was that to get buyers for a portfolio, the seller had to commission loan sale valuations and put them into the data room. Sellers did not have to do this at the time of the Project Eagle process. This happened about a year later, when the loans sales market changed. Bidders were spending so much money on bids and they asked why should they bid any more and they needed to reduce their due diligence costs.

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