THE ACCELERATED WIND-up of the Irish Banking Resolution Corporation has cost the state just under €112 million so far.
The figure is contained in a progress report compiled by special liquidator KPMG for finance minister Michael Noonan, published today.
Total fees came to €119.2 million, with KPMG agreeing a rebate of €7.6 million to the state at the prompting of the minister.
The majority of the fees will go to the KPMG special liquidation team, which has billed just shy of €48.5 million. Legal advisors were paid just under €27 million, while other professional service firms bagged €14.9 million.
The finance minister said that the original estimated wind up costs of IBRC, which was supposed to be shuttered in 2020, had been €1.1 billion.
In addition, the report states that the €12.9 billion advanced by NAMA to the IBRC in the form of bonds at the time of the prom note deal will be repaid in full by the end of the third quarter of this year.
It is understood that IBRC will essentially be wound up as a going concern before the end of the year, although the company will continue to exist to fight legal actions it is currently engaged with, most notably the case against the Quinn family.
Under the bonnet
The report allows a rare view of the workings of IBRC as it wound up.
Since the decision to wind up the company was taken on the night of the revision of the promissory note guarantee, it has sold €21.7 billion of loans, or 90 per cent of the total loan book.
The sales were spread across 52 separate processes, with a total of 345 different parties registered as potential buyers throughout the process, hailing from 13 different countries.
In all, 201 individual bids were registered across six different portfolios. with the Irish originated corporate loan book named project evergreen attracting the most interest with a total of 58 indicative and 20 binding bids.
In addition to the loan portfolios, an interest originally held by INBS, which was acting as a joint venture partner, in an apartment block in South County Dublin was also sold.
It is understood that the entire Anglo Irish Bank art collection has now been sold, with the exception of three pieces.
Project Sand
Project Sand, which related to mortgages originated in Ireland, has proved the most difficult to shift, with only two binding bids out of 13 original suitors for the portfolio.
Only around 64 per cent of Project Sand was originally sold, with the remainder returned to the IBRC.
It is thought that a new valuer will now be appointed to run the rule over the remaining mortgage assets in Project Sand and elsewhere before they are released for sale at current market rates.
Sources indicated that the remaining residential mortgages are likely now to be sold as a single entity, rather than breaking them up and allowing individual mortgage borrowers the chance to buy back their own loans, as had been mooted.
Finance Minister Michael Noonan today commended the staff of IBRC, the special liquidator, and the staff of professional and legal advisors retained to work on the wind up.
The total cost saving to the state of the promissory note deal, of which the liquidation of IBRC was a part of, is thought to be around €20 billion over the next ten years, according to the report.
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