Oireachtas Joint and Select Committees

Thursday, 9 July 2015

Public Accounts Committee

National Asset Management Agency: Financial Statements 2014

9:30 am

Mr. Brendan McDonagh:

With regard to buy value in the Republic of Ireland, there was a huge recovery last year of which we were part, and we are benefitting from it, thankfully, but only 4% of the portfolio was in Ireland, with 1% in Dublin and 3% in the rest of Ireland. Any uplift will be marginal. A total of 50% buy value is in Northern Ireland. It is very location specific. Stuff around Belfast might do well but other stuff might not. The entire portfolio was heavily concentrated in retail. Almost 50% of the portfolio is related to retail in Northern Ireland and the north-eastern UK. When is the right time to sell and what is the best price we can get is a conundrum the whole time for the board. We look at this very closely. Part of the board's work is to do sectoral analysis by geography on each of the markets we are in, and part of this consideration was a separate sectoral paper which took input from various sources and external research specifically on Northern Ireland. We have been operating in this market since 2010. It was not improving and, to be honest, it was getting worse. The portfolio was really granular and it was going to take us a very long time to realise the portfolio. We looked at the cashflows all the way out to 2020 and we conducted a net present value analysis of them-----