NAMA paying €3.46m dividend to its “independent third party” investors for 2011, despite €1bn cumulative loss

The Minister for Finance, Michael Noonan is still not able to reveal the identity of the buyer of the 17% stake in NAMA formerly owned by Irish Life and Permanent (ILP). ILP had to sell the stake after Eurostat warned the Government that NAMA’s €30bn of bonds would have to be placed on the national debt if the Government’s stake in NAMA exceeded 50%. And with our nationalisation of ILP, that was an imminent danger, so Minister Noonan announced the sale of ILP’s 17% stake on 23rd April 2012. Seven weeks later and Minister Noonan still can’t reveal the identity of the buyers telling Sinn Fein’s finance spokesperson Pearse Doherty yesterday

“I am advised by NAMA that it is expected that the private investors will purchase the Irish Life shareholding in the NAMA SPV through a nominee account structure. The detail of this deal, which ILP expect to complete shortly is commercially sensitive. It would not be appropriate, therefore for me to comment any further on it until such time as the deal is completed.”

However the Minister was able to reveal that the three so-called “third party independent” investors who each own 17% of NAMA, walked away with a total of €3.46m in dividends in 2011. This was on top of the dividends of €5.093m paid to these investors in 2010. Remember NAMA made a loss of €1.1bn in 2010 and an audited provision profit of €200m in 2011. So for an organisation nursing €982m of cumulative losses, you might say the NAMA investors have done alright!

Minister Noonan tries to justify the dividend by saying one NAMA entity called “National Asset Management Agency Investment Limited” (NAMAIL) actually makes a profit and it was for this entity’s 2011 retained profits of €8.46m that the 2011 dividend was paid. The view on here is that this machination to stop the NAMA debt coming on to the national debt might be costing us a considerable sum of money – to date, the “third party independent” investors have pocketed €8.55m on a total investment of €51m – not a bad return from an organisation which has run up €982m of cumulative losses.