Fewer Nama loans making income

Fewer Nama loans making income

The proposed Anglo Irish Bank headquarters on North Wall Quay where construction ceased on the site. The State-owned bank will move the most amount of loans to Nama. Photograph: Alan BetsonThe proposed Anglo Irish Bank headquarters on North Wall Quay where construction ceased on the site. The State-owned bank will move the most amount of loans to Nama.

Taxpayers are facing the possibility of losing several hundred million euro through the State’s toxic property loans agency, the National Asset Management Agency (Nama).

The Government originally said the agency would deliver a €4.8 billion profit to the exchequer.

Only about 20 per cent of the loans are generating any income, that is repayments or interest payments, and the rest are currently producing no returns at all. Nama originally expected that 40 per cent would be income-producing.

Nama will release its first business plan later this week. The document is expected to outline three possible results from the agency’s work, due to finish in 10 years.

In a worst-case scenario, Nama could end up losing several hundred million euro. If that is the case, the Government will levy the five participating banks – AIB, Bank of Ireland, Anglo Irish, EBS and Irish Nationwide – in an effort to make up the shortfall.

In a second case, it could gain several hundred million. In a third “very best case”, it could make “a couple of billion”. It is understood that the agency is still hopeful that it can make a profit.

However, sources said that Nama, which has begun buying commercial property loans from the five banks, is unlikely to make the €4.8 billion profit originally predicted by the Government in October.

The revised forecasts for Nama’s performance stem from the fact that the loans it has so far taken over from the banks are in a far worse state than the institutions originally led it to believe.

Nama has taken over €16 billion worth of property loans from the banks, the first tranche of an €80 billion total. It paid about €8 billion, a discount of 50 per cent. The banks led it to believe that this discount would be about 30 per cent.

Sources said yesterday that the agency was “shocked” at the scale of repayment problems it had encountered with most of the loans.

It has also found that the banks did not take up a number of options open to them for recovering cash from property developers who were not making repayments.

One option was a charge over rent rolls. This gave the banks the right to collect rent from tenants in properties such as shopping centres and offices, if the owners were not meeting their loan repayments on those developments. Industry sources said the banks were “scared of pushing developers to the brink” and did not take this option, even though they had a right to do so.

Nama is likely to enforce charges over rent rolls. This will involve the agency going to court and seeking the right to collect rents directly from the borrowers’ tenants.

The developers whose loans have gone into Nama deal directly with the State agency itself.

It can tell them to sell properties and take whatever other steps it believes are necessary to recover the money now owed to the State rather than the banks.

It is shortly expected to buy a second tranche of loans, totalling about €13 billion, from the banks. It will pay about half that figure, €6.5 billion, to purchase these debts. Once that round is complete, it will have a further €50 billion of loans to purchase.

The developers whose loans have been taken over by Nama so far include Bernard McNamara; Liam Carroll, whose Zoe group is in receivership; Seán Mulryan of Ballymore Properties, Johnny Ronan and Richard Barrett of Treasury Holdings and its listed arm, Real Estate Opportunities (REO); and Gerry Gannon.

The properties in which the State has an interest as a result include the Glass Bottle site at Ringsend, which was bought by a consortium for €412 million, and is now reckoned to be worth just over 10 per cent of that figure; and Battersea Power Station in London, which REO bought for €600 million in 2006. Bank of Ireland loaned about €100 million towards its purchase.

All loans on property with an original value of €5 million or more will end up in Nama, irrespective of whether or not they are being repaid.
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Failed planning gave us Nama

NAMA AND ghost estates were the result of a failed planning system, Minister of State for the Environment Ciarán Cuffe told the Dáil.

“We need to ask what went wrong and how we can avoid such dramatically bad planning in the future,” he said.

Mr Cuffe said the Planning and Development (Amendment) Bill, which was passing its final stages, would introduce reform and greater regulatory oversight of the planning system.

All future zoning decisions would be required to be plan-led and evidence-based and should assist in working towards the national interest and efficient use of taxpayer investment in infrastructure. “It is a simple choice between a developer-led planning system or a plan-based one,” said Mr Cuffe.

“Either we take a laissez-faire approach, in which developers call the shots, as happened on far too many occasions in the past, or we co-ordinate our policies and ensure the views of the public matter.”

Responding to Opposition remarks, Mr Cuffe said the Government was not banning submissions on rezoning. It was providing that the strategic issues should be addressed at an early stage of the development process.

“It is not about Mary Mac’s 1.5 acres on the edge of the town,” he said. “It is about the future of the town.” He said he did not want planners facing piles of papers dealing with rezoning decisions in the early stages, when they should be deciding where the jobs, sewers, roads, schools and health clinics should go.

Fine Gael environment spokesman Phil Hogan claimed the Minister of State intended prescribing how many people would live in towns and villages.

When Mr Cuffe denied this, Mr Hogan insisted it was the core strategy. “The Bill is illegal because it seeks to create a framework for planning decisions on the basis of a national spatial strategy that has not been subjected to a strategic environmental assessment or an appropriate evaluation, as required under two EU directives,” he added.

Mr Hogan said the Bill treated personal decisions about where people wanted to live, work and rear families as if they were boxes on a shelf that could be rearranged at the department’s whim.

Mr Cuffe insisted that the Bill allowed local people to make local decisions. “I believe it will result in less intervention from central government because it will allow more robust and sustainable decisions to be made at a local level.”

Labour’s Joanna Tuffy said there was a need to look more fundamentally at planning issues.

“As I understand it, some countries do not allow the type of zoning we allow,” she added. “One can have too much or too little zoning.”
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Hypo Alpe-Adria: Kritisches Dossier verheimlicht?

Der ehemalige Chef der BayernLB, Werner Schmidt, soll seinen Vorstandskollegen sehr kritische Informationen zur Lage der Hypo Alpe-Adria Bank verheimlicht haben.

Der frühere Chef der Bayerischen Landesbank, Werner Schmidt, der der Untreue und des Betrugs verdächtigt wird, soll dem Vorstand der BayernLB ein im Oktober 2006 von seinem Stab verfasstes sehr kritisches Dossier zur Lage der Hypo Alpe-Adria Bank International AG vorenthalten haben. Das berichtet das Nachrichtenmagazin "profil" in seiner am Montag erschienenen Ausgabe. In dem Dossier sei der Verdacht geäußert worden, das Land Kärnten suche einen raschen Verkaufsabschluss, "bevor Probleme offenkundig werden".

Das mit 6. Oktober 2006 datierte Dokument sei im Vorstand nie diskutiert worden, wie Schmidts ehemaliger Vorstandskollege Gerhard Gribkowsky bei einer Einvernahme vor der Staatsanwaltschaft München I am 2. Februar 2010 ausgesagt habe, heißt es in dem Bericht. Das Protokoll liege "profil" vor.

Othmar Ederer, Chef der Grazer Wechselseitigen (Grawe), wird am Dienstag als Zeuge vor dem Hypo-Untersuchungsausschuss des bayerischen Landtags in München erwartet. Der österreichische Versicherungsmanager wird nach seinen Erkenntnissen zum Erwerb der Mehrheit an der Kärntner Hypo Group Alpe Adria (HGAA) durch die Bayerische Landesbank befragt werden. Die Grazer Wechselseitige war an der Hypo Alpe Adria beteiligt.

Nach einem Bericht des österreichischen Nachrichtenmagazins "profil" soll die Grazer Wechselseitige dem Hypo-Investor und späteren Vorstandsvorsitzenden Tilo Berlin Ende 2006 mit einem "Blitzkredit" unter die Arme gegriffen haben. Der Kreditfluss soll aber letztlich nicht zustande gekommen sein. Ederer selbst hatte mehrfach bestritten, in Berlins Investorengruppe auch nur einen Cent investiert zu haben.
(APA)
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