Nama lands billions from the sale of low-hanging fruit

THEY may not be cracking open the champagne at Nama headquarters but no doubt they are feeling quite pleased with themselves. The agency announced this week that it had paid down the last of its senior debt, which brought the total debt repayment to €30.2bn and it was all paid three years ahead of schedule.

But perhaps it doesn’t represent such a brilliant masterstroke when you look closely at the figures. Nama says it has just €3.7bn worth of assets left on its books.

However, that €3.7bn represents loans of €26.7bn in the original total of €74bn in loans it acquired. Nama has basically sold down loans and assets that were originally €47bn and it has taken in €32.2bn for them. That is a discount of just 32pc.

The remaining assets are the real basket case stuff that Nama reckons it can only get €3.7bn for. That is a discount of 86.2pc. It consists of 4,835 loans and 93pc of them are non-performing.

Talk about selling the good stuff in a hurry (three years early in a rising market) and doing very little with the other €26.7bn of loans. Only one-third of it has seen enforcement, with the rest (originally €15.9bn worth of loans) sitting massively in arrears.

Nama has done what the Finance Minister wanted to do, namely sell down quickly to take that financial risk off the Irish balance sheet.

But it has moved so rapidly that it has left over one-third of what it acquired sitting there, worth just 13pc of its original loan value and still to be sold.

What a car boot sale that will be. It has truly gathered and flogged off the low hanging fruit.