Why is Brian Lenihan about to take €1.8bn from pensioners to bail out AIB shareholders and junior bondholders?

The short answer is “I don’t know” but this is precisely what this modern day inverse of Robin Hood is about to do – take €5.4bn from our National Pension Reserve Fund (NPRF) to buy shares in Allied Irish Banks (AIB and for our international friends again has nothing whatsoever to do with Anglo Irish [...]

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A tale of two cities: London and Shanghai – Treasury announces results

One of the NAMA Top 10 developers (and I see marketing itself as “Ireland’s largest property group” on the Treasury China Trust website), Dublin based Treasury Holdings is the key party in two sets of results announced in the last couple of days. This morning, Real Estates Opportunities PLC (REO) announced its results for the [...]

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The frightening damage being done to the National Pension Reserve Fund by using its funds to prop up our banking system

Remember those two investments of €3.5bn apiece made by the National Pension Reserve Fund (NPRF) in our two main banks, Bank of Ireland and Allied Irish Banks? Remember that these investments were in preference shares in both banks, paying a princely 8% per annum? Of course the pesky EU forbade those two banks paying out [...]

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Anglo chairman calls for a second NAMA for banks’ residual bad loans. And nearly two months after the ministerial restructuring announcement, a new plan still hasn’t been submitted to Brussels?

It’s enough to make you want to go home and put the duvet over your head. Alan Dukes, Anglo’s chairman since June this year is reported by RTE to have today called for another NAMA to be set up to act as a receptacle for banks’  remaining distressed loans once NAMA has concluded its work. [...]

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Honohan criticises accountants for failing to show true and fair views of financial performance. But stops short of mandating the implementation of IFRS 9.

Our governor of the Central Bank, the formidable Patrick Honohan, delivered a speech to the Institute of Certified Public Accountants yesterday. In it he summarised for the umpteenth time the background to our financial crisis but extracted the role that accounting has played, and bemoaned how badly we have been served by practices which failed [...]

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UK House Prices drop 1.4% month on month (drop of 0.7% seasonally adjusted)

The Nationwide Building Society has this morning published its UK House Price data for October 2010. The Nationwide tends to be the first of the two UK building societies (the other being the Halifax) to produce house price data each month, it is one of the information sources referenced by NAMA’s Long Term Economic Value [...]

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The Irish Hotel Federation presents its pre-Budget submission – reduce tourist and local authority charges and ensure a flow of credit to the sector. And NAMA shouldn’t distort the market.

I’m between two minds on the health of the hotel sector. It is undoubtedly suffering from poorer bookings and overcapacity in the sector has been an identified problem for a few years now. The industry body, the Irish Hotel Federation (IHF) is giving the impression it is fighting for the very survival of its members [...]

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Bank of Ireland has issued €750m of debt at 5.9%, State-guaranteed, repayable in 2013. See anything wrong with this?

It is hard not to suspect that Bank of Ireland is in a shockingly perilous state at present. We are waiting more than three months now for the publication of the EU Decision on the bank’s restructuring (the Decision was announced on 15th July 2010 and as is usual the Decision was to be vetted [...]

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Collapse in confidence in NAMA’s ability to restore lending conditions – Deloitte survey

It seems that there has been a lot of negativity about NAMA around these here parts recently – is NAMA facing a cash-flow crisis, the abandoning of Tranche 3, lack of transparency in the disposal of assets (and the apparent absence of any code of practice for the disposal of property by proxy), general delays [...]

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CIF wants abolition of stamp duty which is set to contribute €210m to the Exchequer in 2010

The Construction Industry Federation (CIF) has made its pre-Budget submission and is suitably self-interested as you would expect from any special interest group. And nothing in itself wrong with that – construction still accounts for 7% of all employment in the State (nearly 12% of all male employment) and the sector has traditionally been a [...]

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