Nama dealings should be made public after it closes, says Ryan

What the National Asset Management Agency (Nama) paid for individual loans, and what it sold them for, should be made public after the organisation is wound down, the leader of the Green Party, Eamon Ryan, has said.

In a letter to Minister for Finance Michael Noonan, he said he believed a mistake had been made when Nama was established in not providing for full disclosure of its transaction history after it was wound down.

An amendment of the law that established Nama could allow for the disclosure of information about development loans where the original borrower had not been able to meet full repayments, Mr Ryan said.

This would mean that about 750 of the 800 or so developers whose loans were transferred to the agency would see details of their loans being published. Details of who the loan was paid to and the price paid would also be disclosed.

After Nama was established, development loans with a book value of €74 billion were transferred to the agency from AIB, Anglo Irish Bank, Bank of Ireland, the EBS and Irish Nationwide, for which Nama paid €31.8 billion, a discount of 57 per cent. The agency plans to have sold off these loans and to be ready to close by about 2019.

Transparency

Mr Ryan, who was a member of the government that drafted the Nama legislation, said he believed the agency had implemented its mandate with professionalism and dedication over the past six years but that he was making his suggestion to address the debate about a need for greater transparency in relation to Nama’s dealings.

The information to be released could include “details of the original lending institution, the owner and book value of the asset, its location and any security attached to the loan, the purchase price paid by Nama and details of the subsequent sale, including dates of all transactions, the sales price and the identity of the new owner”, Mr Ryan said in his letter.

“Making public the history of [the qualifying] transactions would greatly improve public confidence in the approach that has been taken.

“I do not believe that it would infringe any personal rights or commercial interests, given that Nama will not have an ongoing commercial remit and that it is right and proper for everyone to be able to see what price Nama got in the end for assets that were bought and sold on behalf of the public.”

Straightforward

Mr Ryan added that he believed the proposal could be adopted in a relatively straightforward way through the upcoming Finance Bill.

"The confidentiality clause was put into the original legislation to ensure that Nama would be able to get the best price possible for every asset, but there is no reason why every transaction should not be disclosed once the institution is wound down," he told The Irish Times.