David Cullinane (Waterford, Sinn Fein) | Oireachtas source

We need clarity now on some issues. I will not go over old ground because we want to try to reach some conclusions. When NAMA first attended the committee, it was very strong in its criticism of the Comptroller and Auditor General's report on the discount rate and his understanding of market values and so on. That softened the last time board members were before the committee, and there was some discussion of Mr. McCarthy's interpretation of what he meant in the report and their understanding of it, or at least their perception of it. It might be clearer when the senior officials of NAMA attend a meeting of this committee in a couple of weeks' time.

There is a lot of discussion about whether Mr. McCarthy had market expertise, the level of outside expertise he should perhaps have got and so on. I do not have that expertise. I have to understand this through what I hear from NAMA and from Mr. McCarthy. The same is true, I would imagine, for all committee members. Mr. McCarthy said this is about economic decision-making and the sales strategy NAMA employs, and that whatever sales strategy it employed in respect of these assets would determine discount rates and so on. There was a sales strategy to hold the assets, working them out over time, and Mr. McCarthy mentioned the lower cost of capital, so that would have yielded a higher return. At no point did he say that NAMA should have held the assets until 2020, which NAMA insinuated he did. It is clear that misrepresented what Mr. McCarthy said. It is important that is corrected. Mr. McCarthy's distinction was not so much that if NAMA switched to a loan sale strategy and wanted to sell at that particular time, a market rate would apply and that it should not have applied a higher discount rate, but that with all the evidence the board had at the time, as presented to us, if it had held out and kept to the work-out strategy in place, it would possibly have got a higher return because there was a potential loss in switching strategy.

I want to understand why it switched strategy. That will come back to some of the PIMCO material but leaving that aside, why, from a commercial perspective, did it switch strategy? It is now using retrospective excuses such as Brexit which Mr. McCarthy said it did not raise with him.

It also talks about the low performance of the assets and it had problems with debtors. There were all sorts of excuses given but there is no evidence. We have asked them for evidence to back this up. The secretariat has a briefing note document written by a Martin Whelan from NAMA. Do we have that there on the screen?