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. Oliver Ellingham:

It is not uncommon for bidders like this to know that they are having to bid on a short timeframe and they will say they are either willing to do it or they are not willing to do it. In this case, there were nine parties who were willing to operate in the timescales that were made available for them. Fortress was not saying that it might have paid more had we broken the assets up. It was saying it simply could not reach a value of €1.3 billion. It did not think these assets were worth €1.3 million. We found somebody who was willing to pay that price and from all the work we had covered before, our view was that if we broke it up into smaller parts, we would definitely have got less money.