At all stages the Minister has said that NAMA would seek to recover the hold to maturity value of assets. Interpret this fact how you wish.Īt all stages the Minister has said NAMA would not engage in fire sale. This government has told developers that as long as its in office (the latest date for an election is 2012) they will barely have to pay back any money. It is with great reluctance, then, that I have to say that it’s now pretty hard to see this plan as anything other than a deliberate decision to show extreme forbearance to the property developers who got us into this mess in the first place.Īlso, the following is now a fact. However, in light of NAMA’s own business plan, it will be pretty hard for them to quibble with a developer who offers them a plan of “I’ll wait until 2013 and sure things will be grand then.” Now we’ve been told that NAMA will haul in the developers and look for business plans and the like. Effectively, the developers have been told that they can start paying back the money in 2013. What this draft plan means is that the developers who owe us €77 billion have just been told that we have no plans to recoup this money any time soon. Only in 2013 does NAMA expect the vigorous pursuit to start making real inroads because, at that point, as if by magic, €7.5 billion per year in principal repayments start to pour in. In its draft business plan, NAMA has told the public, and thus property developers, that it expects this vigorous pursuit of the €77 billion that NAMA will be owed to yield principal repayments of €1 billion in 20 and €2.5 billion in 2012. Now, however, we find out how vigorous this pursuit will be. The draft legislation also contains a number of provisions which will assist NAMA in its dealings with developers and ensure that every last cent due to the taxpayer is pursued vigorously. This, from the Minister’s appearance in August at the Oireachtas Committee on Finance and the Public Service, would be a pretty typical assurance: I have always believed the Minister for Finance’s assurances that the developers who owed money to the Irish taxpayer would be followed to the Gates of Hell in order to get the money back. However, at no point have I suggested that NAMA would be a bailout for developers. I have consistently objected to the plan on the grounds that it is a bailout of bank shareholders by the government, involving a large direct transfer of funds from the taxpayers to shareholders. I have been publicly critical of the idea of a “bad bank” plan in which the government overpays for bad assets since a number of months prior to the publication of Peter Bacon’s report.
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