Well there was speculation going around Dublin on Friday afternoon about it, but this morning NAMA has confirmed in a press release – available from their representatives, Gordon MRM here – that the 17% stake that had been owned by Irish Life and Permanent has been sold to a British concern called Walbrook Partners LLP, a company formed in May 2011 by Michael Keeley, Geoffrey Broomhead and Simon Haworth.
You might recall that Eurostat, the EU’s statistics agency which has the final say on the calculation of countries’ national debt said earlier this year that the 17% stake in NAMA owned by ILP was causing it concern since the State now owns 99.5% of Permanent TSB and all of Irish Life, and as a consequence the State was majority investor in NAMA so the NAMA bonds might have to come onto the national balance sheet. The sale of the ILP stake had been announced in April 2012, but despite persistent questioning in the Dail, Minister Noonan refused to identify the buyer.
No details of the purchase price of the stake are available yet. We don’t know the exact terms under which these shares have been issued. NAMA has paid almost €10m in dividends to the three “independent” stakeholders Bank of Ireland, AIB (stake now owned by South African investor Prescient Capital) and ILP (now owned by Walbrook). These dividends were paid despite NAMA racking up €1bn plus losses. Nice investment!
ok.
we need to know the price, the due diligance, the nature of the involvement of these people in other property related issues… a whole boatload
@Brian, seriously. By the way you’re going on, you’d swear we owned 100% of the risk of NAMA (putting to one side the fantasy of NAMA losses being imposed as a levy on the banks, mostly IBRC) or that we owned 100% of what was ILP (we now own 99.5% of Permanent TSB and 100% of Irish Life). That we might be entitled to know the answers to that boatload of questions. Indeed!
i know. Naive of me…
Reblogged this on Brian M. Lucey and commented:
we sold NAMA…well, 17% of it. No, we dont know the price
Extract from The Financial News: The Barclay’s Rapsheet:
Aggressive capital management – The controversial Protium deal (September 2009 – April 2011)
Described by one senior trader who spoke to the Daily Telegraph in April 2011 as “everything that is wrong with the City”, Barclays’ Protium deal was a complicated accounting move to reclassify a portfolio of toxic trading assets in a fund run by former employees.
Barclays sold $12.3bn in assets, consisting of securities and bonds impacted by the US sub-prime mortgage crisis, to a fund called Protium Finance in September 2009, Dow Jones Newswires reported at the time.
Protium Finance was managed by C12 Capital Management, a company incorporated in the Cayman Islands and run by former Barclays executives Stephen King, ex-head of mortgage trading at the bank, and Michael Keeley, a former member of the Barclays’ capital management committee.
Barclays provided a $12.6bn loan to Protium, secured on the credit assets and with a 10-year maturity.
The vehicle kept the assets on Barclays’ balance sheet, although as a loan and not as trading positions – therefore eliminating the need to report market movements in the value of the assets.
Barclays repurchased Protium from C12 in April 2010, paying $270m to an unnamed third-party investor in the vehicle. It also paid an $83m severance fee to C12. Barclays said at the time of the re-purchase: “Acquiring control of Protium will assist the group in facilitating an early exit from the underlying Protium exposures and improving returns.”
Lord Turner described the impact of Protium as “unfavourable to the degree of external trust in Barclays’ approach to issues such as tax, regulation and accounting”.
So…. Who lent Walbrook the money to but the shareholding? How much did they pay for it? Is there a repurchase agreement from ILP – similar to the Barclays deal? If so, has the repurchase price been agreed? Who covers the losses when the shares are re-purchased?
More questions than answers….. especially in view of the track record of the purchasers.
Michael Keeley. Really interesting guy. If you don’t know who he is, it is worth googling him and the word tax avoidance. Two links
http://www.scribd.com/doc/53366122/Barclays-Tax-Avoidance-Scm-Censored-Guardian-2009-BarclaysKnight
http://alexmasterley.blogspot.ie/2009/03/those-barclays-papers-they-didnt-want.html
Walbrook is a newish little project but seems to be a spin out of C12 which was previously involved in some complicated work for Barclays.
Thought it was interesting that Barclays has been assisting them with some financial elements in August.
http://www.efinancialnews.com/story/2012-09-10/barclays-reconnects-with-ex-protium-team-members
Am sure it is just a pure co-incidence.
The fact that ILP is 99.5% owned by the begs the question as to why this shareholding was not tendered publicly as is required under EU legislation. How did they get around that one? Talk about sweetheart deals. This one takes the biscuit – and done with no conscience, or even a pretense at transparency, at all.
Apparently Davy undertook an exhaustive and very rewarding process,on behalf of Irish Life. I know ,i know its commercially sensitive,to reveal the terms,will undermine the fantastic work NAMA is doing………
“The NAMAIL shareholding had previously been held by Irish Life who engaged Davy Corporate Finance to undertake a competitive sales process.”
http://www.nama.ie/news/statement-on-namail-transaction/
@John, we haven’t heard the last of this transaction. If it was indeed sold in April 2012 as claimed by Min Noonan at the time, they were selling to an 11-month old company then. Why didn’t Bank of Ireland pick it up. After all, BofI is being gifted a profit of more than €17m (the nominal value of the ILP shareholding) through the IBRC promissory note jig in 2012/13.
Watch this space, there will be more on this!