Nama to employ 500 IBRC staff

About 500 staff at the Irish Bank Resolution Corporation will be offered positions at the National Asset Management Agency and its third-party service providers in the coming months as loans are transferred by the special liquidators of the bank.

This was revealed by Nama chief executive Brendan McDonagh at a hearing of the Committee on Public Accounts yesterday.

IBRC currently employs 630 staff. Mr McDonagh said the IBRC workers would not be offered the same terms and conditions that they currently enjoy. In many cases, they would be earning more than Nama staff, he added.

Mr McDonagh said there was no certainty that the IBRC staff would accept positions with Nama or its third-party providers. In August, it moved the existing Nama book out of IBRC but the staff would not switch.

“They turned us down because because they were on higher terms and conditions,” he said.

He expects Nama to recruit directly between 180 and 220 staff to work on the IBRC portfolio. The others would be hired by its third-party service providers, who will manage some of the loans on Nama’s behalf.

Loan portfolio
Nama has already chosen Certus to manage the portfolio of loans relating to commercial property, residential investment and development, and business banking, and is tendering for providers for the personal loans and mortgages.

Mr McDonagh told the committee that 50 staff have left Nama in the past two years and the agency is having difficulty retaining skilled employees due to constraints on public sector remuneration.

While recognising the rationale for reductions in public sector pay, Mr McDonagh said there were “potentially serious consequences” for Nama from this policy.

“Our difficulty now is that we are losing many able and talented people and we are facing an uphill battle in retaining others.”

On IBRC, Mr McDonagh said commercial loans with a face value of €20 billion could be transferred to Nama by the bank’s special liquidators, in addition to €1.8 billion of mortgage loans.

The liquidators of IBRC are charged with selling the loans at current market values or transferring them at the end of this year to Nama. If this scenario comes to pass, this would bring the face value of all the loans on the books of Nama to a staggering €96 billion.

Workload
Mr McDonagh said the number of debtors handled by Nama would rise from about 800 currently to more than 3,000.

“That does not include over 13,000 mortgage holders whose loans . . . may also transfer to us if the residential portfolio is not sold by the liquidators.”

The mortgages held by IBRC mostly relate to the former Irish Nationwide Building Society, which was merged with Anglo Irish Bank to form IBRC.

Mr McDonagh said this increase in its work load would present a “major challenge” for Nama. He said Nama was still working towards a 2020 wind-down date, in spite of the extra loans coming from IBRC.

Social housing
Mr McDonagh said Nama has made 4,350 housing units available to local authorities for social housing.

About 1,900 have been deemed suitable by the local authorities, with 400 delivered or contracted to date.

Speaking at Dell's Cherrywood campus yesterday, Minister for Finance Michael Noonan said: "Nama is doing particularly well at present. We will be paying back €7.5 billion [in senior debt] in full before Christmas and that's a quarter of all Nama's liabilities."