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. Frank Daly:

We are not saying that. Leave aside the £190 million. The Comptroller also says - I cannot remember the exact phraseology - that he has not been persuaded that a different approach might not have got a different yield. He does not say whether it would have been greater or less. That is a view, but we have a view, given where we were in March 2014 and what we knew about the portfolio, the Northern Ireland economy, the risk involved and the cost of capital. We did an, admittedly, bespoke process which still had competitive tension right to the end. It is inferred from time to time that there were others out there who might have come in. Who? Nobody has ever identified or even suggested to me who the others might have been that would have come in. There is a kind of contradiction here. On the one hand, there is an inference that we underpriced the portfolio. On the other side of it, all these people walked away. There were seven or eight of them. Do people think that seven or eight of the cutest funds in the world would walk away from a portfolio that we might have underpriced? That does not make sense.

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