Mr. Brendan McDonagh:

First, it must be realised that we acquired loans that were secured on underlying properties, and these properties needed to be managed over time. If it made sense to finish a half-completed development, there would be additional loans to a developer in order to build out and sell properties. That costs money. We look at what is the least costly path. We could appoint a receiver to everything but that will have a cost and the receiver would have no more expertise in building houses than I would. He would just employ a construction professional, add a layer and charge me a fee for that employment. If the builder has expertise to build an office block or complete or construct houses, we would pay him or her a reasonable fee to do it. It would be cheaper than the alternatives.

The Deputy spoke about recovering the par debt. I have been living with this for a long time and every day the objective of my team and board has been to recover every penny we can. We have been quite litigious and gone after people, trying to pursue them in multiple jurisdictions. Some of these people claim they have no money but have employed very expensive lawyers and accountants. They have offshore trusts. We have had to deal with multiple jurisdictions and complications to trace the money trail. It is expensive but we do it.

In fairness to many debtors, they did not see the crash coming and they do not have the money stashed away that people think they have. We have been monitoring these people for years. We do asset searches and check if they have any more assets. If we hear they have assets they have not told us about, the process usually moves towards enforcement very quickly. The Deputy spoke about profit-share arrangements. There were 800 debtors who came to NAMA, with 5,000 parties borrowing into these with the likes of special purpose vehicles hanging out of that.

We have concluded deals with 34 of them, with 20 under negotiation. We are trying to maximise the return by seeing if a debtor can bring something to the table to add value over and above what is there. These things are not entered into lightly but on the basis of adding incremental value to the amount we can return. Some debtors will not pay off their full, par debt but some have done so and by working with us they have been able to come out the other side.

There is no one-size-fits-all approach. It is easy to be popular and close down the whole development community meaning there would be no one around at all but who would get Ireland up and running again now that we need houses, with all the builders kicked out of the game? There has to be a balance and the board and I are not interested in personalities, but maximising the return from the portfolio. The developers are not friends of mine and they do not regard me and my team as friends. It is an arm's length relationship and the more I hear somebody giving out about NAMA, the better I feel about it, because it means we did our job properly. If people were saying we were great fellows I would be worried that they had pulled the wool over our eyes.