The Celtic Phoenix - A thread to list the economic miracles of Michael Noonan & Fine Gael

Well if they can’t recognize it, no one can.

You think with all the shit going on with the Garda commissioner and the pressure the government are under that FG politicians would be keeping their heads down but no Noonan has to threaten the PAC.

I was thinking the same when I heard it last night. If it were FF you’d imagine it was deflection tactics but FG just don’t get it, their arrogance is incredible. Calling FF liars is fair enough but not a few weeks after the mea culpa episode. They really don’t know when to stop digging.

To me FG seem to be a party that have lost the run of themselves and reeling from the constant punches they have taken from the non stop crisis/Scandals that they have presided over. They are lashing out all over the place bit like some of the lads on here.

We’re all going mad now because NAMA didn’t hold the assets until they recovered in value, but the whole point of NAMA was to wrap up in ten years or so and pay down the debt as fast as possible. We are criticising them for not living up to a mandate they never had.

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I will have to respectfully disagree with you. Most people wouldn’t have given a shit about the selling of the assets but what is pissing everyone is the shenanigan that has been going on around the sales. Noonan meeting a bidder a day before the bid, the insiders posing as consultants to bidders to help them through the process. I’d say the actual prices received from the sales is down the list.

It seems to be typical of every crisis or scandal that FG have been involved in since they came into power that they have been doing under the table, brown envelope deals and Noonan seems to up his neck in this.

A lot of Monday morning quarterbacks on this thread.

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The same cunts were saying Nama would cost us a fortune when they set it up, now they’re giving out we didn’t make enough out of it.

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@briantinnion, @Julio_Geordio - my knowledge of this whole NAMA topic is very limited (particularly as I’ve worked in the area) but could the mandate not have been amended as economic conditions changed?

Am I correct in stating that in, say, Germany some of the state owned bad banks had original mandates to wind up operations / sell down distressed assets and/or loans within a specific timeframe? But management allied with government saw the economy rebounding and changed tactics to hold off and get a better return?

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NAMA was originally setup to overpay for distressed assets to alleviate the burden on banks balance sheets. Hold onto them, weather the storm and then sell them back to the market when things recovered.
Everyone went mental that we were overpaying for the assets to bail out the banks, so we paid market value for them instead. Then because we did that we had to bail out the banks as well.
Everyone was roaring about NAMA going on forever and that having so much assets in state hands would destroy the market etc. so it was agreed that NAMA would be wound down by 2020 or so.
In order to achieve this and repay the debt attached to it, NAMA were forced to sell off assets very early in the cycle, thereby getting less than the current value (obviously).
Now everyone is going mental that we didn’t hang onto them longer and get a better price.
You couldn’t make it up.

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Pearse doesn’t hold back. :slight_smile:

Possibly, but they could have done it openly and honestly. Mr noonans prior meeting with cerebrus which he, ahem, forgot, ahem, to mention to the pac, has nothing to do with the mandate of nama.

Absolute bullshit.

Project Eagle was mired in sleaze from the word go and the sale should have been stopped. The taxpayer lost circa €200 million on that deal alone. If backhanders and brown envelopes were the order of the day there then it’ s reasonable to expect that many other sales were equally dodgy.

FG, the party of Michael Lowry, haven’t gone away you know.

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Absolutely. I was an occasional reader of the property pin and regular reader of Namawinelake blog. Both scoffed massively at the concept of long term economic value on these assets and that they might in fact be worth a fortune in the future

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Agreed. The transparency left it at some point no doubt encourages and persuaded by the funds over time

They also had a “social good” mandate they totally overlooked. They didn’t have the expertise to do a lot of the sales work that they had to do.

Mistakes were made absolutely, in fairness they had to setup a massive asset management agency overnight, so that was always going to happen.
With regard to the social good mandate they’ve been addressing it lately, but it’s up to the state to press on that. Their primary concern is maximising return.

NAMA’s success or lack of can be argued but we are now in a situation where

  1. C&AG say NAMA didn’t get the best price possible.
  2. Vulture funds who purchased the assets are not paying tax in Ireland on profits generated in Ireland.
  3. There are criminal investigations on-going in the jurisdictions where the buyer and property are located but none where the vendor resides.
  4. Property and rental markets in Dublin are in a heap, homelessness and rents at an all time high. This is some achievement from FG considering where we were when they took over.
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guff

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Definitely. All the best staff left for the private funds once the opportunity arose. Lot of this was to do with complete inflexibility on salaries and bonuses too though. Would have been a public outrage if they had paid what was required to keep the staff