Mick Barry (Cork North Central, Anti-Austerity Alliance) | Oireachtas source

Does the discount obtained by Cerberus for the 850 properties and the murky circumstances around the £6 million success fee require an investigation? It does, absolutely. However, there is a bigger picture in the sense of how NAMA has operated. By the time it concludes its business, a total of 772 developers will have received write-downs amounting to a staggering €40 billion. We do not know how much of a write-down each of these developers received nor do we know if any other transactions involved illicit success fees. This should be the subject of investigation. We know that less than five of the 772 developers have paid all their debts to date.

The contrast between the treatment they received relative to the thousands who have fallen into difficulties with mortgages is so stark it does not require much elaboration. I offer one example. One of the biggest developers to have exited NAMA, Michael O'Flynn, reportedly had €1.8 billion in loans sold on by NAMA to Blackstone, a vulture fund, for €1.1 billion. This left a €700 million loss to the State. That is more than the entire budget for public capital expenditure on housing in 2014-15. Another example is the Anglo-Irish Bank maple ten developer, Sean Reilly. Reportedly, he cost the State €153 million in losses on his NAMA loans when he exited the agency last year. That has not stopped him from being chosen as the first developer to borrow from Activate Capital, an off-balance-sheet financial vehicle set up by the Irish Strategic Investment Fund last year to lend what is left of the National Pensions Reserve Fund to developers.

By contrast, NAMA has invested a pitiful €260 million into social housing out of the €35 billion revenue it has raised to date, in other words 0.7%. Of the nearly 15,000 houses and apartments in its original portfolio, only around 2,000 or 14% have been provided for social housing. On top of this, since 2014, NAMA has sold enough land for 21,700 homes in the most sought-after areas of the capital, the commuter counties of Wicklow, Kildare, Meath and Louth and the cities of Cork, Limerick and Galway - in other words, at the height of the housing crisis and in the areas where the crisis is worst.

NAMA has recently admitted that only around 1,100 housing units have been built on this land so far. Most of the developers who bought are just sitting on the land waiting for prices to rise. This is so obvious that even NAMA acknowledges rate of return being sought as a factor.

The alleged illegal activities we are discussing here are scandalous. We support the motion and there are some scandals relating to NAMA's legal activities.

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