Treasury Holdings in Nama move

Irish developer Treasury Holdings will today seek to block the National Asset Management Agency from appointing joint receivers to various assets owned by the company here.

Companies associated with Treasury will ask the High Court today to issue an injunction to prevent Nama from appointing receivers to a range of properties it owns in Ireland.

It will also seek leave for a judicial review to challenge Nama’s right to take such action.

Nama yesterday moved to enforce repayment of Treasury's loans to the agency, as first revealed by The Irish Times on January 12th. It informed the company that it intended to appoint joint receivers to assets in Ireland, including the PricewaterhouseCoopers head office in Spencer Dock, the Alto Vetro building on Barrow Street, and the Central Park office complex near Leopardstown, where Vodafone and Tullow Oil have bases.

Nama stopped short of appointing the receivers pending today’s legal action. It is understood that Ernst & Young and PwC have been lined up by Nama to act as joint receivers if the court gives the State agency the green light to proceed.

Treasury had been subject to a two-week standstill agreement with Nama on its loans, which expired at 4pm yesterday.

It is understood that Nama acquired loans relating to Treasury and associated companies with a face value of €2 billion. Nama is reputed to have paid €900 million for the loans, indicating a haircut of 55 per cent.

These figures are disputed by Treasury.

The developer, which is jointly owned by Richard Barrett and Johnny Ronan, had been negotiating with external investors – Australian investment bank Macquarie and global real-estate group Hines – in recent times in relation to the affected assets.

A spokesman for Treasury said it was “extremely disappointed” that Nama had called in its loans.

“Treasury has complied in every material way with Nama requirements from the outset and has honoured the terms of the memorandum of understanding agreed in December 2010,” he said.

The spokesman added that the appointment of a receiver would “destroy further inherent value within the part of the property portfolio affected” by yesterday’s events and would reduce the prospect for the taxpayer to maximise a return on the assets. He said the international investors were prepared to pay more for the loans on the properties in question than Nama paid the financial institutions for them.

“Other than to seek clarifications on certain matters, Nama has not engaged in negotiations with the two potential investors,” he added.

“We understand Nama has said only that the offers made by the two potential investors did not meet commercial requirements but did not outline what those commercial requirements were. We find this course of action impossible to understand.”

The spokesman said the investors had “expressed a desire” to work with Treasury to maximise their return on the portfolio over a seven-year period.

A spokesman for Nama said it had “engaged rigorously with Treasury Holdings since 2010. Unfortunately, it has not been possible to achieve a mutually acceptable agreement on the way forward with respect to the group’s Nama loans . . . Nama analysed the two proposals made and they were not commercially acceptable. The Nama board decided to proceed with the appointment of Receivers at the end of today’s standstill period.”