Mr. Seamus McCarthy:

If I may interject, the valuation that was put on the land was effectively the offer that had come from the local authority. It offered to pay that amount knowing it would have to spend a lot more money on the land to make it serviceable and so on. It seems as if that figure of €265,000 then stuck for the whole portfolio. It is important to recognise that the market value of an asset like this is the price that would be exchanged between a willing buyer and a willing seller. That was not really what the valuer was reporting at this stage. He was reporting on the circumstances of this sale, which were that there was a lot of resistance. There was not a willing seller in the situation. It is important to remember that when NAMA acquired the loan, the assets were valued at that stage to strike the price that would be paid to the financial institution. There was a write-down at that point. However, NAMA paid €4.37 million to acquire these assets but then sold them a number of years later for €265,000 and forewent the interest on what it had paid. That is where the economic loss comes in.

There is, however, another way of looking at this. If the problems that were identified with the properties and the realisability of it had been recognised at the beginning, NAMA would have probably paid less to the bank and the State would have picked up the expense anyway. It is a fairly unsatisfactory situation all told. One of the reasons I drew attention to this is the difficulty that these facts are known locally. People understand that this is what happened. I felt it was important it be recognised, discussed and talked about.