TD writes to Central Bank of ‘possible criminal offences’ by ex-Nama officials

Independents 4 Change TD Mick Wallace has written to the Central Bank to report "possible criminal offences" by two former National Asset Management Agency (Nama) officials arrested last week in Northern Ireland.

The Wexford TD referred in the Dáil to criminal offences of disclosing insider information and inducing others to deal in such financial instruments. He repeated calls for a commission of investigation into the sale of the agency’s entire Northern Ireland loan portfolio in a single deal known as “Project Eagle”, to US fund Cerberus.

Mr Wallace has raised the issue in the Dáil eight times in the past year. Each time Nama contradicted most of what he said and what he said “has been borne out slowly”. He asked if the Government was bothered that enforcement against Northern Ireland borrowers in Project Eagle was “less than 30 per cent of the enforcement against Republic of Ireland borrowers”, who were treated “far more aggressively”.

The €1.6 billion sale of some 900 properties based on loans taken out in the North is under investigation by a number of international institutions looking at fraud allegations, but not in the Republic. “If this is allowed to drag on until somebody is charged, many things will happen in the meantime,” he said.

He believed that if Cerberus was found to have behaved badly in Project Eagle, all the deals the fund had done in the Republic would unravel.

And Mr Wallace said Nama was “already considering selling Project Ruby, Project Emerald and Project Abbey. If Cerberus buys more of these, the problem will be amplified if it is found that it has not behaved well”. He added that it was “mind-boggling” that Nama “has nothing to say about the fact that the two gentlemen were arrested last week”.

Claiming the State had the same attitude to Nama as it did to the banks, he said “it is as if we don’t want to know and they can do what they like”.