Final Nama tally to beat €4bn, says McDonagh
NATIONAL Asset Management Agency (Nama) chief executive Brendan McDonagh has said the agency’s eventual surplus will be more than €4bn.
Nama has already paid €2bn to the Exchequer and few observers had accepted the low forecast the agency has maintained in formal guidance for its lifetime surplus.
In an interview with the Bloomberg newswire Brendan McDonagh said the figure will be closer to €4.8bn.
“I think we’ll be going above €4bn,” he said.
When it was first established, Nama paid €31.8bn to Anglo Irish Bank, AIB and Bank of Ireland for loans with a face value of €74.1bn , using IOUs later repaid as it generated cash.
By the agency’s own calculation, it paid around €6bn more to the banks than the loans were worth at the time – based on a formula for longterm value.
The eventual recovery, which could still take until 2025, will be less than half the face value of the loans transferred to Nama a decade ago, a loss the State picked up through the bailouts.
Nama will transfer another €1bn to the Exchequer this year, after it generated €900m of cash in 2020 and figures from Nama at the end of last year indicate that the total value of loans still on its books is around €1bn.
Nama’s most recent numbers show the average value of property on its books is now around €330,000.
The number of borrowers on Nama’s books is now 170, less than a quarter of the original 800 borrowers whose property loans were transferred to the agency.
The remaining borrowers still have 4,000 loans secured on 3,000 properties.
The remaining cohort of smaller loans linked to a large number of properties is expected to make for relatively slow progress as the agency winds down but at the same time Nama is also backing large scale housing developments on some sites, including the huge Dublin Glass Bottle Company site just south of the city’s docks.