Nama aims to have plans in place by year-end for 150 debtors owing €35bn

Mr Daly said these 150 debtors have either submitted or are submitting draft business plans and Nama aims to review these plans and decide on appropriate strategies such as debt repayment or asset disposal or enforcement by December.

THE NATIONAL Asset Management Agency (Nama) aims to have strategies in place by the end of the year for 150 debtors whose combined debt amounts to almost half – €35 billion – of the €72.3 billion in property loans the agency has acquired, Nama chairman Frank Daly said yesterday.

Nama has already come to agreements on asset disposal and debt reduction with another group – the 30 largest debtors whose loans, totalling €27 billion, were transferred to the agency from lenders in first and second tranches.

The majority of these have either signed or are close to signing memorandums of understanding, said Mr Daly, adding that Nama had approved plans including enforcement for a total of 33 of the 180 debtors made up from these two groups.

Mr Daly also predicted Nama will have determined by mid-August the cases of another 200 debtors from a larger group of 650 debtors with a combined debt of €12 billion whose loans are being managed by the participating institutions under delegated authority from Nama.

Mr Daly revealed that Nama also met Minister of State at the Department of Environment, Willie Penrose, earlier this month to see how how the agency can help with ghost estates it has acquired from debtors.

He said the department has classified ghost estates into various categories and of the 125 in the most serious situation, Nama has an involvement in 10 and will work with the department, local authorities, the Construction Industry Federation and residents to come up with site resolution plans.

Mr Daly said that Nama’s remit was to recover for the taxpayer what it has paid for acquired assets plus any additional project funding, working capital and other costs and it remained its overriding objective to break even in as short a timeframe as possible.

That didn’t mean Nama would be forcing its debtors to engage in a precipitative fire sale of assets which may realise only a fraction of what the assets are intrinsically worth but neither was Nama sitting around in the hope that “the current market hangover will cure itself”.

“What Nama is not, as some commentators seem to think it should be, some form of national financial freezer into which troubled loans can be deposited in the hope of future cryogenic salvation,” he said.

“Nor is Nama a resting home to enable debtors to take time out from the consequences of their borrowing,” he said.