Some 17 years after it was set up to take soured property loans off the balance sheets of our bailed-out domestic banks, Nama is in the final throes of its wind-down, with legislation before the Dáil.
To recap, the National Asset Management Agency, to give it its full name, purchased impaired property-related loans with a face value of €74 billion off domestic lenders, paying €31.8 billion for them in the process. The idea was to free the banks of their bad loans to get them lending again in the economy.
At the time, the government said developers would be chased to the ends of the earth to get every red cent back but that was never a realistic aim, and it soon morphed into Nama being able to recoup the €31.8 billion of debt raised to purchase the loans, a liability that would otherwise have fallen on the shoulders of taxpayers.
So did Nama do a good job?
In the midst our Troika bailout (2010 to the end of 2012), repaying that senior debt looked a steep hill to climb. But the economy rebounded spectacularly and Nama repaid the debt along with €5.6 billion to the exchequer via surplus cash, corporation tax and the transfer of assets to the Land Development Agency.
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A residual portfolio of €25 million worth of loans remains to be worked out by eight Nama staff in a special resolution unit within the National Treasury Management Agency (NTMA).
Nama also claims to have regenerated the Dublin docklands and to have delivered 44,500 homes. Really?
Privately, developers rage against Nama, saying that it sold assets at the wrong time to so-called vulture funds who later made out like bandits; lacked the expertise to play the property market or value the loans; and didn’t trust them to deliver a better return for taxpayers via their own development plans.
There is probably some truth to this but a lot of it is self-serving from people who paid way over the odds for the assets in the Celtic Tiger era and were bailed out by taxpayers.
Nama’s wind-down, along with the formal ending of Irish Bank Resolution Corporation’s liquidation process, draws a line under the 2008 property crash.
Hopefully, we will never see their like again.
