Oireachtas Joint and Select Committees

Wednesday, 22 April 2015

Committee of Inquiry into the Banking Crisis

Nexus Phase

Mr. Brendan McDonagh:

Yes. Well, I suppose there's two types in terms of that. We've got about €800 million of additional security from debtors, in terms of ... as quite a, you know ... this is additional assets that they had. Probably about €300 million of that additional security debtors decided that they would transfer them to third parties, friends, relatives, rather than hand them over to the banks or NAMA, and they probably had about €500 million worth of additional assets which were effectively unencumbered additional assets that they have that they had never given up the security. So when we went through the business plan with debtors we said to them, "Give us a list of your asset transfers in the last five years, and tell us what level of unencumbered assets you were." And, I suppose, everybody was thinking that all these people had a huge amount of assets outside the system, the case in the day. And when you look at it, that these same people had borrowed €74 billion, but all they had was €800 million worth of assets effectively outside the system, so it really ... they hadn't put that much aside in terms of the amount of money that they had borrowed, so we said to debtors, "If you want to work with NAMA and to prevent us taking enforcement action against you, or to prevent us taking actions under the NAMA Act, and with a very powerful section, under 2(11) of the NAMA Act, where we can pursue reversal of asset transfers, you bring those assets back in and give them to NAMA as additional security." And the majority of people did do that as part of their co-operation with NAMA.