Alarm bells should have rung much sooner for Nama over Project Eagle

I was talking to the assistant manager from my local bank the other day. Very bright lad, sharp as a tack, the sort who could accurately count your lodgement just by having a quick glance at the size of it out of the corner of his eye.

He wasn’t impressed with the banking inquiry. “Did you hear the latest?” he said. “We are now having an inquiry into the banking inquiry. We’ll soon have enough for a football team.” He rhymed them off: “Fennelly, Guerin, O’Keeffe (briefly), McCracken, Murphy, Travers, Nyberg, Regling, Wright…”

As he was talking, it struck me that another name was about to be added to the list with the Nama sale of its Northern loan book, Project Eagle. This was an exceptional transaction. Throw in the additional element of the cross-border political dimension and it is clear that Nama’s big guns should have been trained on every move of this deal. Managed well, it would show Nama as a professional and proficient operator. Managed badly, it could leave a lot of value on the table and confirm the critics’ view that Nama was protected from scrutiny behind a wall of civil service secrecy. The full array of oversight tools that Nama could muster should have been applied in spades.