So, what’s been happening on the Project Eagle story today then? So the DFP committee is to investigate the matter, but the chair of that committee thinks it may have to be referred to the Guards and the PSNI. Oh, and Mick Wallace doesn’t see the point. On the Robinson side of the story Gareth (not Gavin who also it seems has links at Tughans) and his PR firm are making themselves unavailable for comment. Next, the Irish News lead …
The Department of Finance and Personnel Committee met today to schedule hearings to investigate the Project Eagle sale of Nama’s Loan Book in the north. The first of the hearings have been provisionally scheduled for Wednesday and Thursday the 15th and 16th of July The Assembly Research Team have been tasked with providing a draft of questions and timeline of events to the Committee. There was widespread support for early hearings across all the parties attending, given the level of …
So what happened last night? Well, not the end of history, as the Tanaiste part billed it), but what’s left of Anglo Irish Bank (IRBC) was wound up. That required a piece of primary legislation to close it down and transfer its assets (and, more importantly, liabilities) to NAMA. Why? Because IBRC’s debt was being paid through the Promissory Note costing a fortune (3.1 billion pa for tens year). The ‘advantage’ of a PN is that it can be unbundled …
While everyone is conveniently busy not paying the Household Charge by the 31st March, the clocks are ticking towards the same deadline for payment of a €3.06 billion promissory note for Anglo-Irish Bank. Fortunately, as reported by the Journal.ie, Finance Minister Michael Noonan told the Dáil last week that: The discussions with the European authorities on the general issue continue but we are now negotiating with the EU authorities, and principally with the ECB, on the basis that the €3.06 billion …
At the Guardian’s Ireland Business blog, Lisa O’Carroll notes of Ireland’s National Asset Management Agency [NAMA] I wrote about the London trophy and landmark buildings amassed by developers for the Observer back in January and at the time, there was a view among the large property agencies in the capital that NAMA wouldn’t flood the market by offloading stock at one time because London, by definition, is “prime” stock – in other words, always sellable. As the head of investment …
Fintan O’Toole’s crisp review of the vast sweep of Irish corruption exposed in the era of tribunals mainly speaks for itself. As he shows, exposure alone does not lead inexorably to reform. Three questions: Can any Irish government and parliament, never mind one under such pressure of circumstances, summon up the massive political capital required to change the culture? If not, can the outside onlooker be blamed for concluding that these people aren’t fit to govern themselves? While the Celtic …
The FT’s editorial yesterday second leading article was entitled In Praise of NAMA. Their logic being that NAMA was the first element in what it proposes as a necessary three part process, that is to force the banks must come clean on their losses. But that it failed to take the second and third steps, ie make a political decision about who should carry those losses and to develop ‘the legal, technical and political capacity’ to impose those losses: Nama …
Political blogger extraordinaire, Guido Fawkes has set the cat among the Dáil pigeons this evening with fascinating results. Guido has obtained and published a list of foreign Anglo-Irish bondholders as of the close of business tonight. The blogger states: Every child in Ireland is being bequeathed a huge debt at birth to protect the interests of foreign, mainly German, bondholders – why? Guido was once a bond trader, it was always understood that sometimes the bond issuer defaults. That is the …
The BBC notes that “Nama, the bad bank agency set up by the Irish government, is to take over loans originally worth around £3.3bn linked to assets in Northern Ireland.” RTÉ gives the figure revealed today by Peter Stewart, the head of Nama’s advisory committee on Northern Ireland, as a “qualified estimate” of £3.35billion [pdf file] (€4billion) and adds Mr Stewart estimated that around €2.4bn of the loans were linked to undeveloped land, €1.2bn to investment properties and €400m to projects which …
Lot’s of really interesting snippets in the Sunday Business Post. Two struck me as worth noting. The first notes that after a narrowing of the interest rates on the bond market, Ireland’s rate of borrowing is getting more expensive again. By Friday evening, ten year Irish bond interest rates were trading at about 4.7%, about 2% above that of German debt and above that of Portugal. The second (and I suspect it’s not entirely unrelated) is the news that the …
