Real villains of the Nama piece were the banks

Spare a thought for Nama, the embattled State agency that has this week been vigorously defending itself against the Comptroller and Auditor General’s conclusion that there was a “probable” loss of value to the State of £190 million (€220m) from the sale of its Project Eagle portfolio in 2014.

While questions are rightly asked of Nama’s decision to accept £1.137 billion for a portfolio for which it originally paid £1.98 billion, nobody was questioning the role of the domestic banks in this mess.

It's worth remembering that AIB, Anglo Irish Bank, Irish Nationwide Building Society and Bank of Ireland originally advanced an eye-watering £4.6 billion to the 56 Northern Ireland debtors in the, ahem, boom years.

The loans were secured by 933 properties, mainly located in Northern Ireland (50 per cent) and Britain (38 per cent, mostly outside London). We can only wonder what was going through the bankers’ minds when they made these idiotic credit approvals.

The value of the loans had already been written down by 57 per cent by the time they came to transfer to Nama in 2010 and 2011, with taxpayers backfilling the balance sheets of the banks to cover the losses as part of the €64 billion gross bailout of the sector.

And their value continued to be impaired up to the end of 2013, around the time that Pimco expressed an interest in buying the loans as a job lot and the whole sale process kicked off.

So Frank Daly would be within his rights in feeling aggrieved at having to publicly defend Nama's role in the sale of these loans when the real villains of the piece were the banks.