Oireachtas Joint and Select Committees

Tuesday, 18 October 2016

Public Accounts Committee

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

10:00 am

Mr. Brian McEnery:

There would have been personal recourse in a lot of borrowings. There may not have been personal recourse in other borrowings. It is also important to mention another reason. As part of our strategy around selling loans in bulk, as opposed to the individual assets underneath, we generally try to blend the mix of what goes into a loan sale. We try to include some good loans, some medium loans and some pretty poor loans that are not generating any income at all. We felt that if we were going to do a loan sale on a bulk, it was important to mix in poor, medium and high-quality loans. When we were looking at those assets, we found that some loans in the poor part of the portfolio were not generating income at all. There was no income coming off of them. In fact, there would have been a cost associated with holding those assets if we had sold off the other ones. I will explain why. There would have been a need for public indemnity insurance in respect of them. Some of the assets would have been deteriorating. Security costs and other costs are associated with poor properties and half-built housing units. Truthfully, the loan process is about trying to get a mix to take to market in order to get rid of the bad ones with the good ones.