Nama ranked as the fifth largest seller of loan portfolios in Europe

The State was the fourth biggest seller of loan portfolios in Europe over the last four years with €63.7 billion in sales from 2015 to 2019, new figures show.

This places the Republic behind Italy, which had loan sales of €230.2 billion over the same period. as well as Spain (€134 billion) and the UK (€89.9 billion).

The National Asset Management Agency (Nama), Ireland "bad bank" was the fifth biggest seller of loans on the continent with disposals totalling €21.9 billion. This places it behind the UK Asset Resolution (UKAR), and the Italian and Spanish banks, UniCredit, Banco Santander and Monte dei Paschi di Siena.

The data come from a report compiled by Debtwire, a technology platform that collates information on distressed debt and leveraged finance. Its study shows that European banks ended 2019 ended with the lowest level of non-performing loans (NPLs) on their balance sheets since 2010.

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European NPL volumes fell to €635 billion for the first half of 2019, down from €706 billion in 2010 and a peak of €1.2 trillion in 2014, according to Debtwire.

The banks with the highest outstanding volumes of non-performing loans across Europe are France's BNP Paribas, and Italy's UniCredit and Intesa Sanpaolo, it said.

European non-core and non-performing loans disposals reached €102.4 billion in 2019, half the record €208.1 billion recorded a year earlier.

Debtwire’s report notes that the Irish market capped off a steady year with all the largest banks selling non-performing loan in the last four months.

AIB’s €3.2 billion sale of its Project Beech portfolio to Cerberus in March was the biggest deal of the year locally. The portfolio, which had a carrying value of €1 billion on AIB’s books at the time of the sale, was made up of loans against 5,000 assets, mainly investment properties. But it also included 220 owner-occupier loans that were cross-secured to wider commercial debt.

According to the figures, two-thirds of the €9 billion portfolio sales concluded in the Republic last year – equivalent to €5.8 billion – were residential.