Developer Gerry Gannon



We don't often see or hear from Frank Daly, the chairman of the National Asset Management Agency (NAMA), the new state bank charged with clearing Ireland's debt mountain.

He's isn't a household name in the way former Anglo Irish boss Sean Fitzpatrick is or the colourful developer Sean Dunne and his former journalist wife Gayle Killilea who, RTE deliciously reminded us last night, represented the height of Celtic Tiger excess when they hired Christina O, a yacht formerly owned by Greek shipping billionaire Aristotle Onassis, to sail their wedding guests around the Mediterranean. "If it was good enough for Jackie Kennedy, I thought it's good enough for me," Killilea remarked at the time.

So when Daly speaks, we sit up.

"A lot of these people have done an awful lot of damage to the country and they really should work for nothing for the country," he told Prime Time Investigates last night.

He described some of the developers as "greedy" or "in denial" but said some had shown they were willing to work with NAMA.

One developer, he revealed, wanted a €1.5m a year salary to continue running his property empire.

"I think it got about 20 seconds' consideration before it was thrown out," said Daly.

But the whole thing felt a bit like a secondary school teacher telling a bunch of kids to stop smoking and drinking outside the classroom.

For what followed in journalist Rita O'Reilly's hour-long investigation was a glimpse of the gilded life some developers are still living, as if the financial crisis had never happened. (You can watch the programme here)

One developer in Cork, Michael O'Flynn, still flies to race meetings in a helicopter. The Augusta eight-seater helicopter costs about €3.5m second hand. He did not personally guarantee his loans and NAMA, this morning, suggested the helicopter was a "lifestyle asset" not funded by any of the five banks participating in NAMA.

Another, Gerry Gannon, the main focus of the investigation, legally transferred 29 properties to his wife Margaret in the last year, in effect moving them out of reach of NAMA should it need to foreclose on any of the loans now on its books.

A tenanted property in Dublin 4 transferred to Gerry Gannon's wife



Among the properties transferred are:

• A greenfield site in north Dublin

• A property in Lanesborough

• Apartments in Portmarnock and Malahide Marina Village

• Houses in Cabinteely, Templeogue, Artane and Clontarf

• A tenanted house near the American embassy in Dublin 4

• Hatley Manor – a river-fronted property with its own harbour in Carrick On Shannon

He has also transferred a 74-hectare site in Loughglynn, a small town in north Roscommon, which includes a former convent on a lake. This, it is believed, was due to be converted into a hotel.

There is nothing illegal about what Gannon has done and there is no suggestion that he has tried to evade the law but the programme's revelations served to underline the view that NAMA needs to up its game, or at the very least demonstrate to the public it has teeth.

O'Reilly and her team have been working on this programme since the end of September and the investigation shows other non-NAMA banks will have first call if they need to foreclose.

Prime Time Investigates confirmed that almost all the transferred assets featured in the programme have no mortgages or charges registered against them. They are unencumbered. Indeed, some properties had mortgages cancelled just prior to their transfer to a spouse.

In relation to loans from non-NAMA banks, Prime Time Investigates did not focus on these. However, it found many cases where non-NAMA banks had registered charges against corporate and personal assets of NAMA borrowers, which means those banks will have first call on those assets.

NAMA was set up about a year ago to secure the future of five Irish banks, by cleansing their books of all the property and development loans – good, bad or indifferent.

Yesterday it confirmed it was now in control of over 11,000 loans with a nominal value of more than €72bn.

Right now, the public doesn't really know a lot about NAMA or how it is going to reduce the burgeoning tax bill every individual in the country is facing in the wake of the banking crisis.

We need more transparency about what it is doing and Daly needs to become a household name.

Yesterday NAMA announced it had reversed transfers of assets worth €130m.

And after last night's programme, it issued a second statement, warning it would pursue developers in court where it could.

"NAMA is acutely sensitive to the risk that developers have tried – or will try – to transfer assets from their own names to spouses or other family members in order to remove them from the scope of NAMA."

It added: "The agency is pursuing developers to bring such assets back. If they don't do it consensually within a specified time period, NAMA will pursue them in court."

Let's hope it has more luck than school teachers and kids with cigarettes.