Banana Nama – 2

Sorry, but I can’t let this topic go.

The Government’s NAMA has bought €77 billion worth of loans from the banks. The property relating to these loans is worth €47 billion, but we’re paying €54 billion for them. We’re told that it’s not a bailout, that NAMA will pursue the developers for their loans just as diligently as the banks would have. And I’ve no doubt that Brian Lenihan believes that.

Ok, let’s keep it simple.

A property company, Balls of Brass Limited, borrowed €1.5 million from AIB to buy a property. This property is now worth €1 million. We have bought the loan from AIB for €1.15 million, to reflect “long term economic value”.

Next week Balls of Brass goes into liquidation. It is entitled to do this, indeed obliged to, as it is hopelessly insolvent. Its only creditor, which is us, gets legal ownership of its only asset, the property which is worth €1 million.

And we’ve just paid €1.15 million for it.

And that’s the end of it. The company is in liquidation - effectively deceased – so there is no-one and nothing left to pursue. The company has met all its legal obligations by handing over its asset to its creditors. No-one has done anything legally wrong.

But we’ve just lost money, unless the Government intends to hang on to the building in the hope that prices will rise. What if they keep falling? At what stage does NAMA lose its nerve and sell for even less than the €1 million it’s supposedly worth now? 

Bank share prices surged on Thursday after the figures relating to NAMA were released. You can see why.

On The Doorsteps

From Saturdays’ Irish Times:

As if Fianna Fáil general secretary Seán Dorgan hasn’t enough to contend with at the moment, a bogus letter supposedly signed by him has being doing the rounds of websites in the last couple of days. Written on party-headed notepaper, it appears to convey instructions to party workers on how to deal with difficulties faced when canvassing.

Seán Dorgan received a copy of the letter yesterday morning. “It’s not genuine. Clearly, it’s my signature, but nothing else. This is juvenile politics and nothing else. It’s a complete and utter fake and forgery.”

Here, however, are the instructions that he really did send out.

1.  Tippex out the words “Fianna Fáil” on your leaflets.

2.  When the voter opens the door, don’t infuriate him by telling him straight out you’re from Fianna Fáil. Tell him you’re a Jehovah’s Witness.

3. If he rails against the bankers, nod sadly and say “I know, they’re fuckers”.

4. Blame everything on the Progressive Democrats – after all, they’re gone now.

5. If he says he has lost his job, don’t say “yes, but more importantly, if you don’t vote for me, I’ll lose mine too”.

6. Any instruction to “shove your leaflets up your hole” should not be followed literally.

7. If he tries to blame Fianna Fáil for banjaxing the economy,  say “you’re right, and as our punishment you should keep voting us back in until we fix it”. This logic is so daft that it might actually work.

8. Keep a car running outside the gate.

How Many TDs Does it Take…

The Government has finally decided that the two vacant Dáil seats will be filled by holding by-elections on June 6th.

Dublin Central has been one TD short for the last four months, since Tony Gregory died. And it’s nine months since Seamus Brennan’s death left a vacancy in Dublin South.

The Government had seemingly been reluctant to hold the by-elections since it is widely expected that they’ll have no chance of taking either seat, and this will reduce their slender minority still further. They have now decided to go ahead on the same day as the European and Local Council elections as they reckon they’re going to be hammered in those elections anyway, and the loss of the two Dáil seats may attract less attention in the general mayhem.

There are two ways of looking at this.

(A) The people of these two constituencies have been denied the full political representation they are entitled to simply to save the present government’s face. This is an attack on democracy and should be widely condemned, or

(B) The people of these two constituencies have noticed no real difference in the way politics has impacted upon them, and have fared no worse than any of the rest of us.

If it’s (A) then the current Government are undemocratic, and should resign. If it’s (B) then there are too many TDs in all the other constituencies, and the number should be reduced substantially at the next election, leading to savings in pay, expenses, support staff, ministerial cars, pensions and the emission of noxious gases.

Simple really. I think it’s (B).

Yet Another Birthday

This blog is one year old today.

I can now celebrate the day I was born (my birthday), the anniversary of the day I got my pacemaker (Tinman’s birthday) and the anniversary of the day I started this (my blog birthday).

This means I have more birthdays than the Queen.

Therefore I’m entitled to have an Honours List.

The MBE (Miserable Bastard Entity): From a lengthy list of contenders (honourable mention here to Education Minister Batt O’Keeffe) I’ve chosen Social Welfare Minister Mary Hanafin, for the decision to scrap the bonus payment to Welfare Recipients at Christmas. She keeps saying that at least she didn’t reduce the rate, but scrapping the bonus week IS a 2% cut, and her refusal to accept that is typical of the type of word manipulation that Ministers are still using, failing to see that it’s this type of crap that’s so infuriating the electorate. Anyway, she’s altered the entitlement of pensioners to medical cards, and shortened the length of time for which you can collect Jobseekers Benefit, so she has reduced benefits, no matter what she says.

The OBE (Obnoxious Banker Entity): Yet another category in which the shortlist is actually a long list. Brian Goggin, outgoing Chief Executive of Bank of Ireland for example, for bemoaning the fact that his salary fell to below 2 million last year, and for the fact that, although he has retired as Chief Exec, he’s remaining on the staff of the bank till June, so he’ll qualify for his full pension. Seanie Fitz, of course, for single-handedly bringing our banking system to its knees through his reckless and quite frankly corrupt business practices at Anglo Irish Bank. The honour goes to Michael Fingleton though. The fact that he tried to pay himself a €1 million bonus despite having presided over a loss of €243 million shows that he has no understanding of what a bonus should actually mean, and was simply using Irish Nationwide as his own piggy-bank. The fact that Irish Nationwide facilitated Seanie Fitz in hiding his Anglo Irish Loans from the stock market is another shining example of the ethical standards of this man.

The CBE (Cute Babe Entity): Ah, Yelena. It’s been over three months since I’ve thought of an excuse to post a picture of her, but she is far from forgotten in my heart, and now that the athletics season is returning you can expect to see lots more photos of her midriff. Or sometimes her bum.

The Nighthood (Because they’re blood-sucking vampires): The politicians of this country, for clinging with their vampire teeth to their outrageous collection of benefits, add-ons and expenses, while all the while telling us that we must all accept the pain together. Chief among them though is Brian Lenihan, for continually trying to give the impression that they are actually taking cuts when in fact they are doing no such thing.

And finally, for running our country into the ground with his throw-money-at-everything-approach to government, for accepting handouts from anyone willing to give them to him, for allowing his poor secretary to attend a tribunal and try to back up the lies he was telling about never having lodged sterling into his account, for then attacking the tribunal when they exposed these lies, for finally trying to explain the money away by saying he won it on horses, and for his overall contribution to increasing the level of contempt and distrust with which politicians and therefore politics itself are held in this country, Bertie Ahern is being made a Dame, because, well, there is nothing like him.

A Portrait of the Taoiseach as a Stung Man

In years to come, the “Portraitgate” saga will be used all over the world in PR classes and tutorials as THE prime example of how not to handle a minor inconvenience.

A mildly interesting story which would already have been forced out of the news by other events has become a world-wide story out of which Brian Cowen comes across very badly.

He himself has said very little about it, and it’s possible that he is looking on in horror as a succession of people trying to help him simply make matters worse, creating an image of him and his government as humourless, draconian, anti-democratic and completely out of touch with what is really important.

Much of this image is, of course, accurate. You have only to watch his bad-tempered, hectoring attitude to the opposition, his goverment’s habit of announcing policy at press conferences rather than in the Dáil, and his refusal so far to bring in any change to the number of his army of Junior Ministers and Committee Chairs to realise that. But the sheer ham-fisted, over-the-top reaction of his fellow TDs, RTE and the Gardaí has re-inforced this image, and has caused it to be broadcast worldwide.

TDs of all parties have circled the wagons and united in condemning this “insult”. By doing so, they reveal how insular, precious and thin-skinned they have all become. Senator Donie Cassidy says that “the Taoiseach is a public figure, but his wife and family are not, and everybody should bear that in mind.” Only a person far too long in politics could come out with tripe like this. Everyone has a family, and if we followed Donie’s logic no public figure would ever be criticised.

Never mind the corrupt wrong-doers like Seanie Fitz or Fingleton. Plenty of other public figures often face ridicule. Remember the dog’s abuse (much of it from TDs) heaped upon Gerry Ryan, simply because he didn’t want to take a pay-cut? Or upon Steve Staunton, just for being a poor soccer manager? Or even, to be fair, upon John “Bloggers Can’t Write” Waters, purely because he wrote a dreadful Eurovision entry? All of these people have families too. Did Donie, or any other TD, have anything to say about that?

And then, oh God, there was the Garda reaction – swift and effective, with a detective, no less, being sent to a radio station to demand details of emails from the artist. Did no-one see how this was going to look in a country where there are now daily shootings, where ordinary people were chased and beaten by drunken scum in Tipperary on St Patricks Day, and where people whose greed has brought this country to its knees face no charges at all?

And having caught their man so quickly, they charged him with … “incitement to hatred”. Ah, here.  It’s a picture of a man on a toilet, for God’s sake. Inciting who, and how?

Last year Fine Gael TD Leo Varadkar suggested that non-nationals who lose their jobs should be offered money to go home. The possible reaction of some members of the public to those who might turn down such an offer and remain here drawing the dole didn’t seem to occur to him, or to bother him. Noel O’Flynn and Ned O’Keeffe have called for a review of the issuing of work permits to non-EU citizens, clearly implying that they’re taking our jobs. Conor Lenihan made his famous “kebabs” remark in relation to Turkish workers, and was rewarded by being made Minister for Integration (and people said Bertie had no sense of humour).

Are any of these cases “incitement to hatred”? Apparently not. Lively political debate, apparently it’s called, when they say stuff.

If Fianna Fáil have PR advisors they should fire them. The government press secretary, whose complaint to RTE was so badly thought through, should either seriously apologise to the party or go too.

The original paintings weren’t especially funny. They certainly weren’t satire – if the toilet roll had, say, the Plain People of Ireland written on it, implying Cowen wipes his arse with us, that might have been satire. But that doesn’t matter anymore.

Thanks to the stupidity of the reaction, Irish political life has ridiculed itself far more effectively than any clever satire could.

Cop Yourself On, Mary

On the day that Jade Goody has died, aged just 27, of cervical cancer, I want again to express my disgust that Mary Harney backed out of a plan to give a cervical cancer vaccine free to 12-year old girls.

The plan would have cost €9.7 million, and might have saved who knows how many girls from deaths as painful and untimely as Jade’s.

But Mary decided we can’t afford it. Are we really that poor now?

When the announcement was made first I wrote this. Needless to say, not one of the wasteful practices I mentioned had been tackled in the period since, but more money has been poured into the banks, incompetent gobshites have got big pay-offs and other, even more incompetent, gobshites have thrown away money taking  helicopters to work.

I ended my previous post by saying “Now Mary, have the courage to stand up for your Department, your gender and the children of your country .”

That still stands. If she can’t find a way to fund this, even just via savings from some of the waste in her own HSE, then she’s not fit to be Minister for Health.

Apparently Jade Goody’s plight has led to an increase in women presenting for smear tests. This makes her more useful in fighting cancer than Mary Harney.

Divide and Conquer

Today I’d like to point out what a brilliant job the government are doing (no, come back, this sentence isn’t finished yet) in turning us against each other.

Whenever public opinion looks like uniting in anger against those who deserve it (the bankers, regulators, developers, and most of all the Finance Ministers) they find a way of dividing and deflecting that anger toward others.

Take the RTE presenters, for example. Although Cabinet Members have taken a pay-cut, the Government have refused to cut the number of Junior Ministers or Committee heads, and the pay of ordinary TDs and Senators remains untouched, so why would one of these Senators, Fianna Fáil’s Jim Walsh, suddenly demand that RTEs top presenters volunteer to reduce their salaries?

Poor underprivileged Jim

Because right away attention turned to the likes of Pat Kenny and Gerry Ryan. Those who took the cut rose in the public regard, and those who didn’t are now perceived as the bad guys.

Interestingly, Jim said the broadcasters were ‘in a privileged position’.  A Senator’s basic salary is €70,133 and the Seanad sits only on Wednesdays and Thursdays.

A week later TD Michael Kennedy suggested that judges could “gift” part of their salaries to the nation.

Michael judges the judges

“It is important now, more than ever, that everyone plays their part in leading us out of this recession and I would strongly urge our country’s judges to step up to the plate and agree on a universal 10% cut within their field,” Mr Kennedy said.

The “everyone” that Kennedy urges to play their part will not, of course, include backbench TDs, since just 11 out of the 127 have offered to reduce their pay. I’m sure Michael is probably one of these 11, though curiously his website doesn’t say so, and since the website does describe him as “Your No. 1 experienced & hardest working public representative in all of Dublin North” he doesn’t strike me as the type who’d have kept this act of selflessness to himself.

What’s important about these comments is not their blatant hypocrisy. It’s the fact that it pits the higher earners and the rest against each other. Ryan Tubridy, Joe Duffy and assorted judges are not responsible for causing any of the current mess, but suddenly it is they who are being pillioried in the media & in the pubs, and the spotlight is switched away from the likes of Charlie McCreevy, or Pat Neary, or Seanie Fitz.

Most brilliant of all, though is the public servants’ Pension Levy. Public and private sector workers are suspicious of each other at the best of times. We regard them as overpaid and overprotected, and they regard us as tax-dodgers who caused the boom by buying yachts and second homes. Brian Lenihan played on this when he had to cut the public sector pay bill.

He could have cut their pay or made some of them redundant, but that would have created empathy for their plight among the rest of us, who are suffering the same things. We might have become more unified, last week’s marches might have been bigger, and the kind of civil unrest we’ve seen elsewhere might have begun here.

So instead he called the reductions a Pension Levy, playing on the fact that the public sector pensions are seen as generous by the rest of us. And when the public sector claimed that the Levy was unfair (and many aspects of it are unfair) we all said “ah shut up, at least yiz have jobs, and a great pension”. Which is exactly what the government knew would happen.

And when the levy protests die down and we start to single out specific ministers again some other Fianna Fáil nobody will be told to open the Dáil window and yell out “what about Martin King off TV3?”

And we’ll all look at one another and say “yeah, I bet he gets paid a fortune, and the weather’s been shite since he started doing the forecasts, he should take a pay-cut till we get our summers back”.

It’s political genius.

If only they were as good at running the country.

Or Maybe Not

Aw look, we've upset him

Dermot Ahern, Minister for Not-Buying-Wine-At-Ten-At-Night, says he believes that the Government (with a ten per cent satisfaction rating in this morning’s opinion poll) is unpopular because it’s doing the right thing. In other words, we don’t appreciate them.

No doubt the same was said about the Clock in the Liffey, Dustin’s Eurovision song and Charlie’s Angels II.

Dermot, I hate to tell you this, but sometimes things are unpopular because they are crap.

What’s the Difference?

I don’t get it.

Minister for European Affairs Dick Roche says that the 10 Golden Circle members to whom Anglo Irish lent €451 million to buy its own shares, and who now apparently are having €300 million of that debt written off, cannot be named, even to Finance Minister Brian Lenihan, who is now the sole shareholder.

He says “It would completely undermine the confidence of customers generally in Anglo Irish Bank if the Minister as shareholder could obtain access to confidential customer information.”

He also denies that the government is protecting or trying to shield any of the ten.

It shows how unwilling government ministers are to appear in public these days that Roche was sent out to bat at all. A man so popular in his (and my) own Wicklow constituency that this poster

appeared at the Bray roundabout at the last election, he wasn’t let out of his box at all during the Lisbon Treaty campaign, despite being the one Minister who actually knew anything about it, because he annoys people so much with his pomposity and vanity. Now the rest of them are hiding behind him.

Anyway, if this people were ordinary customers carrying out a normal transaction, Id agree with him totally. And even in the case of this dubious transaction, I would have agreed that they shouldn’t be named until someone has decided that what they did was illegal, if they had paid the money back.

Because we now own Anglo Irish, and if someone has had €300 million that’s due to us simply written off, then we have the right to know who.

This, remember, is the same Anglo Irish Bank who just last month won an order repossessing the home of former Smart Telecom chief executive Oisin Fanning. The loan was to purchase shares in Smart, which are now worthless, just as the Golden Circle loans were for Anglo Irish shares, which are now worthless. There doesn’t seem to have been any problem naming him. Nor was the any problem pursuing him for his loan, even though he was left holding worthless shares.

So why is it not possible to name these guys (you just know none of them are women), not for dodgy dealing, but for loan defaulting?

Or is Dick suggesting that, as the weeks go by, each Monday Lenihan gets a report from Anglo Irish saying “sorry, boss, we’d to write off another half billion this week,” and when he says “Sweet Jesus, who from?”, they’ll say “sorry, you know we can’t tell you”.

How would that restore confidence? How would that placate the people? How would we ever find out if any of the Directors, including Seanie, have their loans written off?

Come off it, Dick. we own this bank, the ten owe this money to us.

If they want to stay hidden, let them pay it back.

Then Read This, Brian

The six o’clock news has just ended.

Bryan Dobson has just said to the Minister for Finance:

“Finally, there’s an enormous amount of public anger at all of this, at the way the banks have behaved, at the level of regulation that they’ve been subjected to, at the way people like you have discharged your responsibilities and people in positions of political leadership, and from nobody have we heard an admission that yes, we got it wrong and we’re sorry, we screwed up”.

Brian the Anger-Resistant

Brian Lenihan’s answer (and thanks to Sky Plus’s pause-&-rewind-live-TV facility for all this, it’s not just for replaying the penalty we were given against Georgia last night and laughing our heads off , you know) started:

“Well, I’ve been trying to repair this since last September and I have to say that while I’ve received some public anger over the budgetary decisions – I understand that – I haven’t had any public anger in relation to what has to be done about the banks…”

(Sigh).

Then allow me.

A Bank Built on Bull

Last September the people in charge of our banks came running to you crying because the big bad investors were withdrawing their deposits, and there was a danger that they might all collapse. The one most at risk was Anglo Irish Bank, a bank with no on-the-street profile, no public branches, no day-to-day cheque book facilities, who had grown moderately large purely by lending huge amounts of money to a small number of  investors and property developers. You decided that we, the Irish people, would guarantee that any money deposited with these banks would be repaid.

Among the people Anglo Irish lent money to was its own Chairman, Seán Fitzpatrick, to whom it lent sums ranging from €122 million to the €84 million he still owes now. Seánie hid this from the public each year by borrowing the same sum from Irish Nationwide for a few days at the end of each financial year, so that on September 30th the annual accounts showed that he owed nothing. Around the time that you were giving the guarantee on our behalf your Financial Regulator, the egregious Pat Neary, discovered that this had happened, but somehow you weren’t told till December, according to, well, you.

Sean the Disappointing

When it all came out Seánie resigned, and you said you were “disappointed” by his behaviour.

It now turns out that at year-end this year Anglo Irish gave €7 billion to Irish Life & Permanent, who put it on deposit in … Anglo Irish. This meant that in its accounts this year it was able to show customer deposits at €7 billion more than they really were. No matter what crap is talked by the banks about it being “normal inter-bank lending”, this was fraud. I can see that, and so ought you .

This was discovered last October by the very accountants you sent in to examine the affairs of Anglo Irish. They reported it to your Department, who deemed it serious enough to notify (oh God) the Financial Regulator, but you didn’t read that part of the report.

In simpler terms, Brian, coz I realise you have the attention span of a newt when it comes to reading stuff, you bailed out a bank that was so riddled with corrupt practices that its Balance Sheet has been nominated for the Booker Prize for Fiction, at the very time when you were thinking up a Budget taking Medical Cards from over-70s, denying anti-cancer injections to 12-year old girls and targeting disadvantaged schools.

Pat the Pensioned

The dreadful Pat Neary was finally shamed into resigning in January. He got a €630,000 severance payment and gets a pension of €142,000 a year. As a reward for incompetence that takes some beating.

As for the ILP “deposit”, according to you, the “specific character of  this transaction was explained to me in the middle of January by my officials”. I’m surprised they could find words small enough. Anyway, for many of us this would have been the final straw, and we’d have decided to let Anglo Irish collapse & rot in its own filth, but to you it was one of the factors that persuaded you to nationalise it. You now knew that absolutely no trust could be placed in any of the financial reports from Anglo Irish, but decided that we, the public, would take it on, dodgy debts and all.

You called in the Chief Executive and Chairwoman of ILP to give them a damn good talking to. When? In January, when your officials spelled out what they’d done? Er, no,  today, after the Press found out about it.

Not one person in any bank (including the one we now own), in the Finacial Regulator’s Office or in your Department has actually been sacked yet. Needless to say, you have neither resigned or been sacked. The smug smirk on your face when this was suggested in the Dáil today truly was a picture that told a thousand words, many of them crude enough to be understood even by you.

You say you haven’t had any public anger, yet in the Sunday Business Post of just four days ago Peter McLoone of  Impact said “People are angry at the unfairness of this measure when the bankers and property speculators who caused this mess are being let off scot-free”.

Tinman the Pissed-off

In case you don’t have time to read papers, perhaps you can at least look at the pictures. Today’s Irish Times has a photo of Dublin Bus drivers outside the Department of Transport yesterday with placards saying “Billions for bankers – P45 for Bus Drivers”.

Make no mistake, Brian, the public are angry over all this. Very angry.

You are useless, and should go.