| Quarter | Covering period to | Delivered to DoF | Published |
| 1 | 31st March, 2010 | 30th June, 2010 | 13th July, 2010 |
| 2 | 30th June, 2010 | 30th Sept, 2010 | 2nd November, 2010 |
| 3 | 30th Sept, 2010 | 31st Dec, 2010 | 2nd March, 2011 |
| 4 | 31st Dec, 2010 | 31st March, 2011 | Waiting …. |
It will be a test of the incoming government’s commitment to transparency to see how long it takes Minister for Finance, Michael Noonan to release the NAMA report and accounts for Q4, 2010.These documents should have landed on his desk by last Thursday at the latest and they also incorporate NAMA’s first annual accounts, the significance of which is that we might get more accounting detail than contained in the quarterly accounts – of special interest will be a revaluation of NAMA’s loans and details of how NAMA has advanced working capital to developers. Minister Noonan’s role is not to make changes to NAMA’s accounts – after all NAMA is an agency independent of government, so we’re told. How long with Minister Noonan make us wait for the report and accounts? There will be tracking on here but meantime this entry examines areas of potential interest:
(1) The operating profit or loss for the year. NAMA should be showing an operating profit. Think about it – the agency is funded by bonds which simplistically cost it 1% in interest and it receives interest at 3%, or thereabouts, from developers. On €72bn of loans, that 2% margin should contribute a healthy operating profit. Aah, you might say but NAMA has huge overheads that will eat away any profits. That is true but what is not commonly understood is that NAMA was entitled to recharge the due diligence and valuation costs to the banks last year. And NAMA’s core costs were put at only €25m per annum. NAMA must pay other third parties, for example Capita which provides loan management services and its insolvency practitioners but I would still have expected NAMA to report an operating profit. On the other hand only 25%, or thereabouts, of loans are actually repaying interest.
(2) Loss on loan revaluations. NAMA’s primary property market, Ireland has continued to tank since the NAMA Valuation Date of 30th November, 2009 so the €72bn of loans bought for €31bn should be worth substantially less than their purchase price – in fact the estimate on here is that €71bn of loans that were bought for €31bn will be worth only €25.2bn today; that’s because NAMA was paying a Long Term Economic Value premium of some 10% and also because NAMA’s property markets have dropped by an estimated blended average of 12%. It is true that 5% of the €31bn that NAMA paid for the loans is in contingent subordinated debt which won’t be honoured if NAMA makes a loss but that still means NAMA has lost about €4bn on these loans.
(3) Profits on sale of loans/assets. NAMA sold €2.7bn of loans/assets in 2010. In truth the sales were pretty much all made by the NAMA Participating Institutions (PIs – AIB, Anglo, Bank of Ireland, EBS and INBS). And when NAMA says “sale” these might have been borrowers repaying their loans or the banks selling the loans or foreclosing on the loans and selling the property. Very little, if any, of the €2.7bn was directly “sold” by NAMA. But because these loans at the PIs were NAMA-eligible and NAMA-bound, then NAMA should benefit. Of course other non-NAMA banks, Ulster Bank and National Irish Bank for examples, which were jointly funding projects will have received some of the proceeds but NAMA should have benefited. And you would expect NAMA to have made a nice tidy profit on these sales if NAMA is executing its asset management function properly because they should have been low-lying fruit, better quality assets where the borrower or project was financially sound.
(4) Derivatives and hedging profit or loss. It was remarkable how the Q3 accounts were dominated by reporting of derivatives and hedging. You might have thought that NAMA was an asset management company but these derivatives and hedges – simplistically insurance policies to guarantee exchange rates and interest rates – made up a large part of the reporting. In Q3, NAMA reported a substantial loss on derivatives and foreign exchange losses of €27m. The NAMA chairman Frank Daly said some of these losses should reverse in Q4.
(5) Performing loans. Yes this is a component of operating profit above but deserves a separate heading. Performing loans are defined by NAMA as those operating in accordance with the loan agreement AND repaying interest (as opposed to those performing in accordance with their agreement and rolling up interest). Famously in the draft business plan put this key performance indicator at 40%, then went to 33% in April 2010 at the NAMA Oireachtas Committee hearing, then went to 25% in the June 2010 business plan before apparently increasing in the Q2, 2010 accounts to just below 30% before finally falling to some 25% in Q3.
(6) Working capital and other funding advanced to developers. Some €500m had been advanced as at the end of Q3, 2010. Will we get more information in the annual accounts to know where this money has gone?
(7) NAMA cash on hand. It seems that NAMA has now totally abandoned its short and medium term funding programmes which were to allow the agency access up to €5bn from the market to allow the agency invest in developments. In what seems to me like a monumental planning cock-up the agency has now seemingly decided that it can fund development through its operating income and repayment of loans. Why was this not considered by the expensive consultants advising NAMA in 2009? What happened to the fees paid by NAMA to
Banc of America Securities Limited, Barclays Bank PLC, Citibank International Plc, Credit Suisse Securities (Europe) Limited, Deutsche Bank AG, London Branch, Goldman Sachs International, ING Bank NV, The Royal Bank of Scotland plc and UBS Limited and The Bank of New York Mellon? All wasted? I expect NAMA will have €0.5-1bn cash on hand at the end of Q4, 2010. Remember though that this is a temporary cashflow aberration because NAMA will ultimately need redeem its own bonds and that will be NAMA’s moment of truth.
(8) Legal activities. Q4, 2010 was when NAMA went to court with Paddy McKillen. Paddy lost comprehensively at the High Court and then won a narrow victory at the Supreme Court. Legal fees on both sides may be in the millions of euro. Will NAMA disclose the cost of defending the action and now that the Supreme Court has partly upheld Paddy’s action, will NAMA be making provision for paying not only its own fees but Paddy’s. Elsewhere NAMA placed Bernard McNamara and others in receivership in the quarter but there is unlikely to be much detail disclosed on these actions. NAMA has only had one legal case where it initiated action and that was against Paddy Shovlin and the Fitzpatrick brothers.
(9) Salaries and bonuses. Generally grabs attention, particularly in Ireland. There are moves afoot to force all state agencies to disclose salaries and bonuses of staff and I understand we will start seeing more transparency in 2011. Will NAMA disclose salaries at the agency which are expected to average €200,000? What bonus did NAMA CEO Brendan McDonagh get for 2010 – he was reportedly entitled to a maximum of 60% of his €430,000 salary. Did NAMA chairman Frank Daly only get paid €170,000 – I say “only” because Frank has been a very prominent and well-informed voice of NAMA in the past year. Given that the mainstream media seems uninterested in the apparent 70% increase in director fees revealed in the Q3, 2010 accounts, perhaps this won’t be such an avidly awaited heading.
(10) Developer business plans. The absence of agreed business plans one year on from the transfer of the first tranche should be worrying. By “agreed business plan” I mean the three documents forming an agreement of the plan (a) Memorandum of Understanding (b) Heads of Terms and (c) Final agreement being signed by (a) NAMA (b) the developer and (c) potentially the developer’s wife. The first 30 developers absorbed by NAMA have average loan exposures of €900m so you can sympathise with the enormousness of the task facing NAMA. But NAMA is employing third party examiners of business plans and expensive consultants. So is the delay a result of reasonable difficulties being managed by NAMA or is there some dysfunction in the agency? Increasingly it is looking like the latter.
NAMA Wine Lake 
Neil writing in the Sunday Times today:
Nama faces €1bn loan value drop
Decline in property values adds to woes of asset agency which will be forced to report a loss for the year, despite having made an operating profit
Neil Callanan Published: 1 May 2011
Nama is also likely to have to take further write downs on its Irish portfolio
The National Asset Management Agency (Nama) will take a write down of at least €1 billion on the value of its property portfolio in its 2010 accounts, government sources say, because of the continued decline in the Irish property market.
The write down means it will report a loss for the year, despite having made an operating profit.
Under legislation introduced by the last government, Nama bought loans from the banks based on their value in November 2009. Since then values in Ireland have continue to fall — the property price index produced by the International Property Databank (IPD) showed commercial property prices fell nearly 11% last year in Ireland. Losses were offset in part by rising prices in Britain, where Nama owns a €10 billion asset portfolio.
The IPD index showed average prices there rose by about 7% last year, but this would have been higher in London, the location for the majority of Nama’s UK assets, suggesting it will have outperformed the average there.
Nama is also likely to have to take further write downs on its Irish portfolio in the current year as values continue to fall. Average commercial property prices fell 2.3% in Ireland in the first quarter, the IPD said last week, adding that “continuing economic uncertainty is stifling any full blown recovery in the market”.
The government’s plan to retrospectively abolish upward only rent reviews will also hit the agency. Nama believes it will reduce the value of Irish investment property by 20% to 25%, resulting in a write down of up to €2.25 billion in the value of its Irish loans.
The agency’s board warned the Department of Finance last year that it was “very concerned” about the implications of changing the law. Doing so would mean “Nama would have effectively overpaid . . . the various participating institutions for assets that Nama acquired and will acquire from them”.
Nama plans to dispose of a quarter of its €30 billion assets by the end of 2013. By the end of the first quarter it had approved €3.1 billion of sales.
@WSTT, by my calculations NAMA should be showing a loss of €3-4bn on its portfolio which it bought for €31bn. In addition, the five participating financial institutions will need take “levy” losses of €1-2bn because the subordinated bonds will not be honoured. In addition, if the UORR legislation is enacted in the way that the consensus suggests then NAMA may be looking at a short term loss of €2-3bn. And if prices freeze in 2011 and don’t recover or the recovery is to a lesser degree than the NAMA operating costs/interest costs then NAMA may indeed be facing a €7bn loss and there will be an additional €2bn loss at the banks in the form of the “levy”.
At the top of this page you can see the performance of the main commercial and residential indices in Ireland and the UK since November 2009, NAMA’s valuation date. Ireland and the UK are estimated to comprise 93% of NAMA’s assets. From the information available in the first two tranches it would seem 20% of NAMA’s assets are primarily associated with residential property and the remaining 80% with commercial property. The NWL index is presently 888 meaning that NAMA needs see a 12% blended average increase in its markets to break even at a gross level (gross excludes operating losses/profits). And this assumes that NAMA will not ultimately honour the subordinated bonds that comprise 5% of its payment to banks. So Anglo, AIB, EBS, INBS which comprise 85% of the NAMA transfers will need absorb an additional loss if NAMA overall makes a loss.
However, if you were an optimist you might hope that we are close to the bottom of the market at present and that the pace of recovery will outstrip NAMA’s operating costs/interest costs. And NAMA is a 10-year project.
With respect to Neil’s article which repeats some of the claims in his FT articles.
(1) “€10bn of assets in Britain” – this is presumably one third of NAMA’s €30bn of assets (in fact these assets were worth over €70bn at the banks). €10bn looks low for Britain but NAMA tend to differentiate between Northern Ireland and Britain and indeed on occasion have referred to the UK as what is technically Great Britain. The last geographic breakdown of NAMA assets last August showed that 27% of (nominal value) assets were in the UK (Great Britain and Northern Ireland).
(2) “the majority of Nama’s UK assets are in London” – interesting if true