Oireachtas Joint and Select Committees

Thursday, 30 September 2021

Public Accounts Committee

NAMA Financial Statement 2020 and Special Report 111 of the Comptroller and Auditor General

9:30 am

Photo of Brian StanleyBrian Stanley (Laois-Offaly, Sinn Fein) | Oireachtas source

Deputy McAuliffe is as láthair as well and Deputy Carroll MacNeill has not joined us yet but may later. I have a few questions for Mr. McDonagh myself.

On the overall performance of NAMA, the €74.4 billion was the par value of the loans at the point when the agency acquired them. It got them at a 60% or 57% discount and €31.8 billion was the cost in public money. Mr. McDonagh outlined this morning that NAMA will achieve a surplus of €4.2 billion plus about €400 million in tax, and that is it. The mandate obviously is to try to achieve commercially the best return for the taxpayer there. The agency is hoping to achieve somewhere just the far side of €36 billion over its lifetime, by 2025, in terms of the final figures. This is less than half the par value of the loans at the point NAMA bought them. If you look at it this way, there is a hit to the public purse there of about €38 billion that obviously had to be made up. That was the impaired loans, that was the bank bailout and that is what the taxpayer coughed up for. Should NAMA be more ambitious in trying to bridge that gap? I am aware it was probably under pressure from Government, and maybe Mr. McDonagh can clarify this for me, to sell a lot of those loans early. Some of us would have felt that perhaps they were sold a bit too early. I think it would be accepted that had NAMA been able to wait another one, two or three years, some of those loans and the properties they were on would have achieved a far better outcome. Would that be correct?

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