Cantillon: Crosbie Nama move mystery

The nature of the relationships between the individual developers who had multimillion-euro loans from the covered banks, and the State-owned National Asset Management Agency, has to be one of the great untold stories of the era.

As receivers were appointed yesterday to a range of assets owned by Harry Crosbie, the agency was keeping schtum on what exactly had led to the move.

Crosbie sang the praises of the agency in an interview with The Irish Times three years ago, when his loans were in the process of being moved from AIB. "I'm very impressed with the way they're doing their business," he said, and he went on to give his view that the establishment of Nama was a good idea.

Relations can't have been helped when, a year later, he told Brendan O'Connor's Saturday Night Show that he would only have to pay the agency the amount it had paid the banks for his loans, and not the amount he had actually borrowed from the banks.

“The money we’re going to pay back is what they paid; that’s the only money . . . that’s what’s going to happen in the real world.”

Given that he was on national television at a time when special taxes were being levied on the population to fill the holes in the banks created by their reckless lending to the property sector, it was an impolitic statement to say the least.

On a “you can’t get blood from a turnip” basis Crosbie may well have been right, but it is not the line the agency likes to hear being bandied about.

How much the State agency can recover from the Crosbie loans is, by all accounts, a €500 million-plus question.