Mr. David Hall:

I will preface my remarks by stating that there are many examples of this and that will be obvious when anyone visits the office. This valuation - it was an independent valuation confirmed by Pepper, which was acting on behalf of Shoreline, and through the Housing Agency - put the property value at €265,000. The repairs required to bring it to a standard where iCare, as an approved housing body, would be able to manage property and have people living in it, as per the rules of being a landlord, would have cost €6,413. The offer made by iCare to buy that property from Shoreline, via Pepper, was €258,587. A discount of 8% was required in order to make it work the way the social housing model works. The other example related to Start Mortgages and the figure involved was 12%. These are examples of the nonsense, misleading information and assumptions regarding funds holding loans. It is worth pointing out - to be fair to Pepper, as opposed to Shoreline - that most of the mortgage-to-rent arrangements made prior to iCare's involvement were done by Pepper, which was dealing with 50% of all such arrangements. Mars Capital is also actively involved in mortgage-to-rent arrangements and other forms of restructuring. This goes back to the myriad connections that exist.

A discount of 8% would have been required in the case in question and the discount required in the case involving Start Mortgages would have been 12%. In the correspondence we shared with the committee, one can see that - this is even more sickening - our office's expectation is that anything above 15% will be rejected. When the solution involving a discount of 12% was rejected, our staff queried it on the basis that the company only normally rejects anything involving a discount of more than 15%. These are the lovely vulture funds that have swooped in and picked the carcasses of families who they will effectively throw out on the street. However, the Minister for Finance, the Taoiseach and many others state that vulture funds are wonderful to deal with, that they are nice and that they bought the stuff cheap so logically they will be able to do deals. That is factually incorrect. We are giving the committee this first-hand evidence from the coalface and we will supply more in the future.