Oireachtas Joint and Select Committees

Thursday, 29 September 2016

Public Accounts Committee

Special Report No. 94 of the Comptroller and Auditor General: National Asset Management Agency Sale of Project Eagle

9:00 am

Mr. Frank Daly:

It is not correct, Chairman, to say that at no stage did we value those properties. In fact, we had read book values for many of them at the year end. In some of the individual ones, for example, one of the biggest assets in that whole portfolio was a UK asset and we had a value for that of €200 million. We had other sales going on during the period prior and after. Sales are the very best indication of property values. We would say, in fact, that approximately 50% of the Project Eagle assets were directly or indirectly based on valuations. We adopted a bespoke process in this and we accepted that certain features of the normal sales process would not actually apply, including the commissioning of property valuations. That was related to sensitivities about the Northern Ireland market and the fact that if we had started doing that it would have been very apparent very quickly that we were about to embark on a sale of the portfolio. I believe we would have been totally frustrated by some of the debtors if they got wind of that.