The National Treasury Management Agency (NTMA), the umbrella state agency which includes NAMA amongst its operations has today produced the April 2012 monthly version of its so-called “Investor Road-show” which is used to attract and retain investment in Ireland, which will be particularly relevant if we do get back into the bond markets next year, though it should be remembered that the NTMA has said that it expects to start selling substantial amounts of short-term debt during Summer 2012.
Of particular interest on here is what the NTMA has to say about NAMA and there are a few snippets of note:
(1) NAMA now has nearly 210 employees, that’s up from 40-50 from when NAMA was first conceived and 100 at the end of 2010. Remember NAMA also pays for 400-500 staff at IBRC, AIB and Bank of Ireland to manage NAMA loans, and NAMA also employs a veritable army of third party suppliers of professional services.
(2) NAMA was sitting on a cash mountain of €4.6bn on 31st March, 2012 which will have become a relative €1.5bn molehill on 2nd April 2012 when its coffers were raided to the tune of €3.06bn by Minister for Finance, Michael Noonan who was “deferring” the payment of Anglo’s promissory note by using NAMA’s cash to redeem it, pending Bank of Ireland’s buying a Government bond. No seriously, that’s what happened. The hope is that Bank of Ireland will buy the bond by the end of June 2012 and that the Government can give NAMA its €3.06bn back, with interest.
(3) To the end of March 2012. NAMA has approved €8bn of disposals with 90% outside Ireland(and understood to be mostly in the UK and London in particular). Remember that to the end of September 2011, NAMA had booked a cumulative total of €2.7bn of disposals on which the Agency had booked a disappointing total of €132m in profit – “disappointing” because these disposals were supposed to be of better quality assets in liquid markets.
(4) It is amazing that over two weeks after NAMA handed over the management accounts for 2011 which will have contained the 2011 impairment charge estimate, the NTMA is still unable to provide the impairment estimate though it has no qualms in claiming the NAMA operating profit in 2011 is “forecasted to exceed €700m”.
(5) NAMA has “made decisions” on 97% of its loans, or €72bn of the €74bn in money terms.
(8) NAMA has made 8,000 individual credit decisions; which is considerably up on the cumulative total of 6,000 on 6th February 2012 and 7,000 claimed at the Oireachtas hearing on 14th March 2012.
NAMA Wine Lake 
Has the Agency or anyone else for that matter tried to give a breakdown on a county by County basis of the Number of Debtors in that Particular County?Don’t think that would break any confidentiality agreements that may be in place would it?Would make for very interesting Comparison in terms of how many debtors per county and how many of these have been saved or sunk.
@Patrick, no, no-one has done that and it would probably only apply to the small-scale debtors. To which county would Derek Quinlan be ascribed?
Point taken on Quinlan,However would it not be Possible to give a breakdown per county on the number of companies and or individuals involved in the NAMA project and how many of these have been saved or sunk.The Smaller players although not as high profile as D Q still have huge sums of debt involved.(The Galway Case mentioned last week for example)
Point ‘number two’ above.
Interest is paid on the bailout, and then interest is paid on the jiggery poker to deal with the promissory notes, supposed to be covered by the bailout….
and someone still needs to come up with 3 billion.
This problem has been dealt with?
Right so.
Re point 2 above, I gather that the Gov settled the E3.06bn pro note instalment due to IBRIC with a 2025 Gov bond which was then repo’d to NAMA for 90 days after which BOI will do a 12 month repo on the 2025 Gov bond so that in approx 12 months time IBRIC will need to find cash of E3.06bn to close out the BOI repo, shortly after the time when the next E3.06bn instalment of the pro note is due to be paid by Gov to IBRIC. The so-called E3.06bn cash deferral for 13 years for the Gov’ment is really only a 1 year deferral, IMHO.
Michael
Difficult to reconcile these contrasting statements,or does the NTMA consider “Ireland” to be the 32 counties !
NTMA also noticeably silent on Frank’s wild dream,to provide a resi put option which he discussed in early March,another false start NAMA?
“8 March 2012 – The National Asset Management Agency (NAMA) will offer vendor finance to potential buyers of commercial property in Northern Ireland to help stimulate investment and create jobs, NAMA Chairman Frank Daly said today. ”
http://www.nama.ie/news/launch-of-vendor-finance-in-northern-ireland-a-significant-positive-for-investment-and-jobs/
“NAMA will provide staple/vendor financing on commercial property sales in Ireland” pg 63 link above.
NAMA’s list of “achievements”
Items 1 and 2. Same thing. It acquired the loans and paid c. €32 billion for them. If it didn’t do that – it wouldn’t exist. Equivalent to stating the “bleeding obvious”.
Item 3. Paid down €1.6 billion in NAMA debt. This is not an achievement. It was commercial madness. Giving back money that’s only costing 1%.
Item 4. Cash balances of €4.6 billion. Not any more – it hasn’t had it since the raid by the baldy balaclava man.
Item 5. NAMA generated €7.2 billion in cash since inception. Has it cost a billion to run the place for the past 3 years? (€7.2b – €4.6b – €1.6b = €1b)
Item 6. 2010 profits: This should read “loss of circa €1.2 billion”.
Item 7. 2011 profits: This should read “loss yet to be divulged.”
Item 8. Should read “unemployable lawyers, busted flushes, wet-behind-the-ear civil servants and regurgitated lifers from failed banking institutions”
Item 9. Decisions made on 97% of business plans? This stopped 9 months ago – at least any communication to the debtors of the decisions made stopped at that time. Most debtors have heard nothing from the Agency.
Item 10. 8,000 credit decisions made in 3 years. Thats approximately eight per day, or one per hour – ranging from the sublime to the ridiculous – such as accepting repayment in full for a loan account (this takes about 6 weeks). All this is with a staff of 200!!
Great achievement, guys. Keep it up. It’s no wonder we’re in a mess and the country is a laughing stock.
P.S. Piece of advice …. First thing you need to do is sack the PR twerp who writes these lists.
@WSTT, on item 5, I guess that the interest on its bonds would make up most of the cost to date. And remember that the €1.6bn of debt repaid comprises €1.25bn redemption of NAMA bonds, €0.25bn repayment of “advance” from the Central Fund in May 2010 and €0.049m repayment of what was supposed to be seed capital from the Central Fund which together with €0.051m from “independent third party” investors made up NAMA’s initial €0.1bn capital.
On the credit decisions, NAMA has been dealing with 1,000 per month since February 2012 which looks far more impressive.
Reflections on the interesting NTMA presentation linked above in the post –
Slide 32 – the dog in the road knows that the CSO figures are wrong for price falls. The adjustment to date has been c60%. Of course that would mean admitting that the PCAR 60% threshold has already been reached and the 21% drop from here has happened.
Slide 33 – Of course in the next slide the residential yield needs to rise from c5%+ to 6%+. Is that not a 20% or so price fall? Look at this in the context of slide 35 which says that supply and demand appear to be in balance in the residential rental market.
Section 4 – Banking. Misses the obvious point. Why is NAMA not properly capitalised? Why didn’t Blackrock get to look at NAMA’s books the same way it looked at all RE loans in other banks?
Slide 60 – saying cash was €4.6bn on March 31st is a bit cheeky. Didn’t NAMA pay the ECB that day on the prom note and reduce cash by €3bn?
Slide 60 – 8,000 credit decisions??? That is laughable. €1bn advances divided by 8,000 decisions gives an average advance of €125,000, which is barely what a small residential mortgage looks like. Given that NAMA don’t do mortgages and a large proportion of these are advances into projects into the UK then it appears that a high portion of these “credit decisions” are banal administrative requests “(An bhfuil cead agam dul go dti an leitheras?” types). Go to any pub in certain areas of Dublin and you will get bizarre things that have been the subject of NAMA “credit decisions”. This is all a smokescreen to make it appear that NAMA is ‘lending’ in Ireland. It is not. We shouldn’t buy this.
Slide 63 – Are NAMA saying that they will advance “equity capital”?? No fire sales, no speculation?? The phrase “market neutral” has now gone out of fashion I see. Based on the NWL index, if assets you bought for 100 are now worth 83, how come saying that you will not impair them down to 83 is not counted as speculation? Or saying that you are convinced that if you will hang on in there until they go over 100 again is not counted as speculation?
Don’t get me wrong, there are positives for Ireland in this presentation but the stuff to do with NAMA is not the strongest spoke of the wheel. I wonder if the big guns of the Troika will interrogate it?