Nama to shut down 16 years on from financial collapse

The National Asset Management Agency (Nama) will be dissolved at midnight tonight 16 years after it was set up to take over the property loans of the Irish banks.

The agency was established in December 2009 at the height of the financial collapse.

It bought loans from the banks which had a face value of €72.3 billion.

Controversially it paid €31.8 billion for the borrowings, a discount of 58% which left enormous holes in the balance sheets of the banks.

Those gaps were filled with a capital injections of €40 billion from the Irish taxpayer.

In addition to earlier recapitalisation payments, the total gross cost of the bank rescue came to €64 billion for the Irish State.

NAMA was run by CEO Brendan McDonagh, who was on secondment from the National Treasury Management Agency (NTMA), the body which manages the national debt.

Mr McDonagh, who was NAMA’s only CEO, will now return to a new role in the NTMA advising State authorities on investment projects with a capital value of over €75 million.

The eight remaining staff in NAMA will transfer to a resolution unit within the NTMA along with €58m of cash and assets of €23m.

NAMA was set up as the banks were struggling with huge property loans which developers were unable to repay.

The agency’s establishment happened as Ireland’s economy ground to a halt, unemployment soared and property prices collapsed.

A year after NAMA was established Ireland accepted a €67 billion bailout loan from the Troika of the European Central Bank, the European Commission and the International Monetary Fund.

Officials from the Troika regularly met NAMA staff in Dublin and set tight deadlines for the agency to dispose of properties it has taken over.

After 16 years NAMA has paid back the €31.8 billion which it borrowed from the State and returned a surplus of €5.6 billion including corporation tax payments of €450m.

NAMA said it facilitated the delivery of over 44,500 new homes in Ireland, with 14,660 directly funded and delivered.

Today the Minister for Finance Simon Harris said “NAMA was created as an exceptional response to an exceptional crisis.”

He added it made a “lasting contribution to Ireland’s economic and social development”.