Mick Wallace (Wexford, Independent) | Oireachtas source

I am a little taken aback by the position which the Tánaiste is taking on NAMA. I raised this issue with her before the summer recess, when I marked her card that all was not well with NAMA. I told her that it would do her no favour to do nothing about this. Since then, a lot more questions than answers have been thrown up. At a meeting of the Committee of Public Accounts on 9 July, the CEO of NAMA, Mr. Brendan McDonagh, argued that the sale of the Project Eagle portfolio represented the best commercial option for NAMA as, according to him, there had been little or no investor interest in acquiring either Northern Ireland assets or the associated loans. This is not consistent with statements contained in the NAMA Northern Ireland advisory committee's minutes of the meeting of 7 October 2013. At that meeting representatives of CBRE gave a summary of the Northern Ireland real estate market. NAMA was represented at that meeting by, among others, Mr. Frank Daly. CBRE said that, positively, rent and yield forecasts across the commercial property sector were predominantly stabilising or strengthening and added that US investment funds were showing interest.

Cerberus has been able to sell loans for double what it paid for them in a very short period. Why could NAMA not do that? If due diligence with NAMA in Dublin for Project Eagle cost €1.8 million, can the Tánaiste explain why the same work in the North should cost €21 million? That is what Cerberus paid over for four weeks' work. NAMA had to do more work on due diligence than the people working for Cerberus, including those in Brown Rudnick and Tughans. NAMA sold Project Eagle to Cerberus for approximately 27p in the pound. The missing 73p has been picked up by the Irish taxpayer, those in the South, not the North - this is not just a Northern problem.

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