Frank Daly spoke with Matt Cooper of Today FM on the Last Word yesterday. The Nama chairman robustly defended the performance of the secretive ‘bad bank’ and those six figure payments to bust property developers. It’s a long transcript but worth a read.

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Matt Cooper: “How much has NAMA changed from what it was originally set out to do?”

Frank Daly: “It hasn’t changed at all in relation to the fundamentals. The fundamental objectives of the agency, you mentioned yourself, it was designed to take all those bad loans, the land and development loans off the banks and we have done that. That’s been our first major task. Something like 16,000 loans, totalling, on the book value about €74 billion, which is a massive amount of money. We took those off the banks’ books. We cleansed the banks’ balance sheets of that dross. And that was our first and main job of work, which I think we’ve done quite successfully. Our task now and our task for some time has been to actually manage those assets, manage the loans, manage the collateral behind them. To get the best possible outcome for the Irish taxpayer and that’s what we’re focussed on, right now. And that’s a mixture of, you know, selling assets and of managing those assets and in some cases actually, investing in those assets – so we do get a better return over the remaining nine or so years that are left for NAMA to do that.”

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