Mary Lou McDonald (Dublin Central, Sinn Fein) | Oireachtas source

The Minister is in fierce bad form. That is too bad. This is not all about him. It is news to me that he threatened to injunct the Committee of Public Accounts. Shame on him if that is the case. I suppose that mirrors the approach and the attitude he displayed this evening. Quite frankly, I could not give a curse what his view is of Sinn Féin. I do take exception to him levelling positions against my colleague, Deputy David Cullinane, however. That is the demonstrable evidence that the Minister is on the back foot

The Minister has clearly read the report, he does not like what is in it, so he thought he would come in and talk about himself for ten or 12 minutes. Perhaps within the Fine Gael Parliamentary Party that is a deeply fascinating topic but it leaves me rather cold.

What we are interested in is the substance of the report. It is important to say at the outset that our work conducted over 11 meetings between 29 September and 14 December 2016, having heard 57 hours or oral evidence and having received in the region of 3,000 pages of written evidence in regard to the matters at hand, absolutely vindicates the position of the Comptroller and Auditor General. That is it in a nutshell. As the Minister knows, the Comptroller and Auditor General was subjected to a vicious and an unprecedented attack from the board of NAMA. He was subjected to a very similar attack in intent, if not in tone, from the Department of Finance. Long before the Project Eagle report was even published, NAMA and the Department of Finance - the Minister, Deputy Noonan's Department - were out of the traps telling all and sundry that the Comptroller and Auditor General did not know what he was talking about, that he was out of his depth and that the only people in all of Ireland who knew how to sell property, according to him, and how to make deals were his friends in NAMA. It was only after hours of questioning at committee that NAMA finally had to admit and concede that its public criticisms of the Comptroller and Auditor General were not based on fact. Given the fact that the Minister's Department and the State agency were quite prepared to attack a constitutional office for the simple act of doing their job and doing it thoroughly and fairly, we should not be a bit surprised that the Minister would come in and attack the rest of us this evening.

Let us recall what the report tells us, and it is very shocking. Anybody who was uneasy about Project Eagle and the probable loss, which is echoed in the report of the Committee of Public Accounts, would be even more uneasy having sat through the hours of evidence and if they were to read our report. The idea of a northern debtor-based strategy for NAMA originated with a man called Ian Coulter of Tughans solicitors in Belfast, another man named Frank Cushnahan who had been appointed to the Northern Ireland advisory committee of NAMA, a NAMA insider, and a third person called Tuvi Keinan of Brown Rudnick, a firm in London. They approached at least two funds with the idea of this debtor sale and one of them, PIMCO, decided to go with it. This is where it gets interesting because politics gets involved.

The DUP in the person of Sammy Wilson got involved. He wrote to the Minister - it is all reported faithfully in this report - in support of PIMCO's approach. Interestingly at this stage, NAMA decided to change its sales strategy. It moved away from one based on working out the loans until 2020 to one based on bundling them all together and selling them in what they describe as a "bespoke process", that is, one designed specifically to meet the needs of PIMCO. All of this was happening while Frank Cushnahan, a Government appointee, was a member of the Northern Ireland advisory committee of NAMA. He left in November 2013 and two months later the NAMA board decided to go with the sale of the northern portfolio - which we now call Project Eagle - with a minimum price of €1.3 billion. Despite months of requests and the submission of thousands of pages of documents, NAMA was unable to produce any contemporaneous evidence to explain how the board arrived at that €1.3 billion figure. As it happens, PIMCO had already told the NAMA board in September 2013 that it would be willing to pay up to €1.3 billion for the portfolio, a rather curious coincidence. It is a matter of curiosity that the two figures coincided and there is no paperwork - I repeat no paperwork - for the calculation behind that €1.3 billion sales price. There is no paperwork because there was no sophisticated calculation. That should bother the Minister. It should alarm him.

While all of this was going on the head of NAMA knew that Frank Cushnahan was representing, as has been said, the interests of the five largest northern property developers on the books of NAMA, and Frank Daly knew all of this and he did nothing. Similarly, when NAMA found out in March 2014 that Frank Cushnahan was involved in a fixer fee arrangement, the response, according to our evidence, was to try to keep PIMCO, the payer of that fee, within the process.

On 13 March at a very crucial meeting, the board of NAMA met and it is clear to me from the minutes of that meeting that the board was informed of Frank Cushnahan's involvement in the genesis of Project Eagle and this whole sales process going way back. The board tells us otherwise. It claims that is not the case but that is simply not credible. It is not credible that the board only found out of Frank Cushnahan's involvement, and assumed then that he only got involved in all of this, once he had resigned from the NAMA northern committee.

I could go on and on but I will not. Suffice to say, having just scratched the surface of a single transaction - because bear in mind our committee was limited in its powers of investigation - what we found was very troubling. The big question is this: was Project Eagle an outlier? Was this an exception? Was it exceptionally sloppy, comprised and corrupted or was and is Project Eagle the norm? That is the issue. If the Minister, Deputy Noonan, was doing his job, beside coming in here giving us guff, that is the issue that would be sounding a big alarm bell in his head and it is the reason we absolutely need a commission of investigation.

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