Examinership a bitter pill for landlords
A number of the participants from across the pond referred to the attractiveness of “getting on with it” and letting people, and banks, start again.
One of the participants, Anthony Murphy, a senior economist with the Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas, is a former academic from UCD. He said that while the level of foreclosures in the US was too high, the near-zero level of repossessions in Ireland was too low.
Interestingly, different states in the US have different laws in relation to whether people whose homes have been repossessed can be pursued for that part of their mortgage not satisfied by the sale of their former homes.
However, even in states where the banks can legally pursue people for the part of the mortgage that remains outstanding, the practice is not to do so.
This, the conference was told, is because everyone involved accepts that both the banks and the borrower have made mistakes, and the best thing to do is to draw a line under the whole matter, and move on.
Dalkey can Kish goodbye to oil fearsThey may have been busy negotiating traffic in large, hydrocarbon-consuming cars at the time, but presumably some south Co Dublin residents gave a cheer when the news broke that Providence Resources had handed back its foreshore licence for the Kish bank area, effectively putting plans to drill off Dalkey on hold.
The move was a result of An Taisce’s discovery that the law under which the licence was issued in the first place was flawed.
The Government had incorrectly transposed the EU’s environmental impact assessment directive into law in 1999.
The Government now has to correct the error and Providence will have to go through the process again.
Presumably this means that its plans for exploratory drilling in the Kish licence area will be delayed.
The problem looks like it could be more of a headache for the State than Providence. The Government has to correct the error.
It is an EU directive and so the Government has no choice but to transpose it correctly into Irish law. Given that we are talking about a clause of a sub-clause, this should not be too difficult, but a large number of interested, influential and vocal parties will almost certainly be scrutinising the process.
Although it is not thought to be a big risk, there may be other licences, permits, etc, lurking out there that were issued on the back of the flawed provision, so there may yet be other consequences.
Providence, meanwhile, has other, much larger fish to fry. The Tony O’Reilly jnr-led company is likely to step up the search shortly for a farm in partner for Barryroe, the prospect in the Celtic Sea – far away from Dalkey – from which it says it could recover 280 million barrels of oil plus large quantities of natural gas.
Barryroe is close to the existing pipeline running to the mainland from the Kinsale field, cutting out at least some of the costs of exploiting its natural gas.
It also has a stake in Dunquin in the Porcupine basin, where multinational Exxon has plans to drill this year. Despite the setback with the Kish licence, Liberum Capital yesterday recommended Providence as a buy at £5.89 and set a long-term target price of £22 on the stock.
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