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GAN - Greens Against NAMA 
09/10/08 at 18:02
The following message about Nama was sent on 4th October to all TDs and Senators as a follow up to that sent on 28th August. Several recipients pledged to raise the suggestions in the Dail or at the Committee stage of the Nama Bill. Whether any of them make it into law remains to be seen.
On 28th August, I wrote to you signifying my deep concerns about Nama. In the event that Nama proceeds in its present form, I wish to offer the following suggestions to help enhance public trust and improve its effectiveness:
1. Whistleblowers’ Charter
The Nama Bill covers corruption, acting in bad faith, conflicts of interest, lobbying as well as failures to comply with obligations. It also provides for extensive reports, audits and accountability. Provision should also be made for a whistleblowers’ charter to cover staff within Nama, covered institutions, debtors, advisers and service providers so as to help ensure that these parties all operate to the highest professional and ethical standards.
2. Reporting on Policy Matters
As the incumbent Minister for Finance will effectively control a €90 billion property empire and as several individuals of different political hues could fill this role over the life of Nama, robust checks and balances are essential to ensure that these ministers cannot use Nama in any manner at variance with its original purpose. To see how easily this can happen, consider Nama’s sister body, the National Pension Reserve Fund which was set up to develop an international investment portfolio over a twenty-year horizon. Eureka, at the Minister’s direction it now holds €7 billion of Irish bank shares amounting to a third of its total assets. Sections in the Nama Bill preclude its Chairman and CE from discussing policy matters with Oireachtas Committees. As things stand, these committees could be prevented from raising major issues, such as pricing of asset sales, on the grounds that these are policy matters. These sections should be removed and senior management should have unrestricted access to Oireachtas Committees.
3. Management Resources
After market risk, the key variable determining the success of a venture is usually managerial risk. In Nama’s case, the former will be addressed largely by the size of the so-called haircut. To address the latter, Nama’s senior management team must have extensive direct experience of world-scale asset recovery and portfolio management. Reliance on local secondments, expensive advisers and delegation of anything but basic administrative activities back to covered institutions should be minimised. The proposed staffing of Nama is only a fraction of that used by the Swedish “bad” bank operation which dealt exclusively with nationalised banks and had a loan portfolio far smaller than Nama’s. It appears that Nama’s inhouse staff of under a hundred people people will be managing a highly fragmented, complex portfolio worth €77 billion and covering 20,500 loans linked to almost 2,000 developers’ business plans. Such an approach is penny wise and pounds foolish and is equivalent to sending a boy on a man’s errant. Accordingly, the management resources and expertise within Nama must be appropriate to managing one of the largest property portfolios in the world even if this entails much higher operating costs than envisaged to date.
Thank you for reading this. I would welcome feedback or comments but please don’t simply reply with a canned response or by enclosing any more general policy documents about Nama.