Gilmore 'uneasy' over €54bn payout

LABOUR PARTY:LABOUR LEADER Eamon Gilmore has warned that with the establishment of Nama "the State will have an enormous vested interest in restarting the property boom, in getting property prices back up as high as possible".

Mr Gilmore said it was clear that the lessons have not been learned and the Government was deliberately overpaying for bad property loans.

“If the Minister’s figures are right, that overpayment amounts to €7 billion but only if the figures are right. No matter what the odds, it’s a €54 billion bet. There are aspects of these figures that make me deeply uneasy.

“The Nama Bill before the House is intended to protect the toxic triangle, [Fianna Fáil, banks and developers] not break it up. Worse than that it will create an unhealthy alignment of interests for future governments to contend with,” Mr Gilmore said.

During the ongoing Dáil debate on the Nama legislation he said “the catch cry is that Nama is ‘Tosit’ – the only show in town. The disciples of ‘Tosit’, who must presumably be ‘Tosers’, are everywhere. But the ‘Tosers’ have an interest in maintaining the status quo. In having themselves rescued from the consequences of their own mistakes. The taxpayer has a different interest, and it is not Nama.”

Mr Gilmore said every measure proposed to be taken will be assessed on the criterion of “what this will do to property prices, and what impact this will have on Nama”. The priority would be to get property prices as high as possible. “Nama will in that sense, have to be self-fulfilling prophecy, everything possible will be done to ensure that it succeeds.”

Insisting that Nama was the wrong fix that should never have happened, he said it was a scheme to nationalise losses and privatise profits.

Defending the party’s alternative, he said that Labour did not propose blanket nationalisation and made no proposal for a 50 per cent writedown of bad loans. He said there was no evidence to support the Minister’s claim that Labour would have to borrow at market rates of 4 per cent to recapitalise the banks.