NAMA in Blunderland

Come with me once again down the rabbit hole well trodden by Irish property developers and their enablers in Irish banks and the Irish state bodies.

Our hero today is Killiney solicitor Brian O'Donnell, a man who somehow managed to leverage his business in just over a decade to the point where he was buying Washington skyscrapers overlooking the White House, entire buildings in London's Canary Wharf and Stockholm's biggest office block.

Of course, the money for these nine-figure purchases was largely borrowed from banks. And now they'd like it back. Bank of Ireland is looking for around €70 million from O'Donnell and his doctor wife. But that's dwarfed by their total property debts of over $1 billion.

So far, so Celtic Tiger collapse. But what's especially hallucinogenic about this case is not only the massive amount of money that the banks leant to a lawyer and a doctor to buy skyscrapers all around the world. What's really, really straining the limits of credibility is the fact that our hero is currently on a panel to advise NAMA.

Needless to say, like all good state agencies, NAMA is spunking absolute fortunes of state money at lawyers. The agency is expected to hand over €260 million to legal eagles over the course of the next decade. That's a quarter of a billion euro of OUR MONEY.

And who are these incredibly expensive legal advisors? Well, 64 firms have been appointed to a panel to share the booty. And unbelievably, Brian 'Billion in the hole' O'Donnell is one of them.

Let us pause for a moment to catch our collective breath at this audacity.

Somehow a lawyer managed to persuade the banks to loan him not a few hundred grand for a couple of buy-to-lets, nor even a couple of mill for an apartment block, but one BILLION dollars for skyscrapers.

Then it all went tits up for property, and now the banks want their cash back and are suing to get it. O'Donnell being a lawyer, is obviously fighting it. Fighting in court is what he does well, unlike investing in property.

Meanwhile, the state via it's impaired bank loans vehicle NAMA is doing the best it can to bail out the poor developers and the banks who got burnt went property went poof.

And of course, this is inevitably a bonanza for lawyers, as all state agency activities tend to be. But the incredible chutzpah, the sheer gall of all involved to appoint a lawyer to this advisory panel, which will pocket quarter of a billion in fees, who himself got spectacularly burnt and is in debt to the tune of $1 billion on property, is staggering.

Let's go over it one more time, real slow: NAMA has decided it is appropriate to take legal advice on handling their crappy property loans from someone who themselves owe a billion bucks to the banks on property deals.

They're either mad as a hatter, or they've been chewing on the wrong side of the mushrooms. And they've obviously stopped even caring about what they do or how it looks to us poor pleb mugs who just had our entire futures mortgaged to the IMF to pay for all of this mess.

Moliere

I never was mad on Moliere when I studied French. It all seemed too archaic, his plots (an underrated element of any fiction-writing) far too contrived.

The French loved him of course, and consider him their Shakespeare. It's one of the few aspect of French cultural life, along with Raymond Domenech and their penchant for air traffic strikes, that leave me baffled.

But by God is he on the money when he defined journalism:

Writing is like prostitution. First you do it for the love of it. Than you do it it for a few friends. And then you do it for money.

He's also spot on with a number of other observations too. On drinking:

Let us drink while we can. We cannot drink forever. (from Le Bourgeois Gentilhomme.)

And: Of all the noises known to man, Opera is the most expensive.

Mind you, he probably hadn't heard the whining of Irish bankers and developers. Compared to NAMA, opera is a total bargain. Not to mention much more tuneful.

Plan B

Biffo says there is no other option than NAMA. He says there is no Plan B.

Apart from the fact that Fine Gael have proposed a good bank/bad bank option and Labour have proposed temporary nationalisation of the banks, Biffo is still wrong.

While the Opposition proposals are improvements on the blatant bailout of Biffo's plan, there is a third option. It's called capitalism. Not crony capitalism like Fianna Fail understand. Proper capitalism.

Allow me to summarise: LET. THE. BANKRUPT. BASTARDS. GO. TO. THE. WALL.

But Biffo says we need to bail out these banks so that they can get lending to the rest of us and improve the economy so that we can stop borrowing a billion every fortnight and we won't have to call in the IMF.

Biffo couldn't be thicker if he was a bottle of pigshit.

Here's how to save the country's finances, Biffo. Here's Plan B:

• Let the zombie banks and the developers go to the wall. 77 billion saved right there. Then start prosecuting the bankers. Take them through the courts, using CAB if necessary. Probably a couple of billion minimum right there.

• After that, there's halving the salaries of TDs, closing the Seanad and making all representatives provide receipts for expenses, and capping the total at 10K per person per annum. Hundreds of millions saved.
  

• Make ministers drive their own cars and fly with their new bessie mate Mick O'Leary, and sell the Mercs and jets.
  

• Increase corporation tax by 2%. Not enough to drive FDI away, but enough to bring in an absolute ton of revenue.
  

• Cut the dole to no more than 25% higher than Britain's. That'll stop the vast amount of welfare tourism into Ireland, and will incentivise the unemployed to seek other options. Ideally, I'd timecap it to six months too, but in current circumstances it's unreasonable to expect people to find work in that period. But I'd timecap it as soon as we get unemployment back under 300,000. Billions saved there. Literally billions.
  

• Scrap the asylum system entirely, including the appeal system, and implement a pro-active approach involving identifying a capped number of those worthy of asylum and patriating them here ourselves. Deport everyone who has lost their case without appeal. Stop anymore coming in at the airport. Insist on Romanians and Bulgarians demonstrating an ability to support themselves here for three months or refuse them entry. Hundreds of millions annually saved on legal fees alone. Hundreds of millions more saved on processing bogus claims from the likes of Nigerians, over 95% of whom were found NOT to have a case on first application. And probably at least a billion saved in free legal aid, medical care, welfare benefits and so on.
  

• Introduce a third rate of tax on earnings over 100K per year of 60%. Introduce the American system of demanding tax returns from ex-pats on pain of loss of citizenship.
  

• Cap public sector wages at 150K per annum per person across the board from Brendan Drumm down. Introduce legislation to end their generous pension entitlements.

• Cancel all property-related tax incentives immediately, and the same for stud farms and all the other rich men's tax shelters.

• Legalise cannabis, licence it for sale and tax the hole out of it. Hundreds of millions in revenue right there.
  

• Introduce a property tax based on square footage of property owned, on an exponential scale, with exemptions for primary family homes under 100 sq m. Own half of Wicklow? Time to pay up, sell up, or open up your stately home to the nation.
  

• Prosecute Ahern. Not a lot of cash in this, but it is essential to demonstrate to the world that we're drawing a line under our corrupt and shady past.
  

I'm not saying this will reverse our currently catastrophic economic situation overnight. It won't.

But it is such a clear and vast improvement on the Government's plan A - to give tens of billions to corrupt bankers and their bankrupt specuvestor clientele - that you'd have to question who the Government actually represent.

Because it's definitely not the Irish taxpayer.

The NAMA Republic

At a time with approaching half a million on the dole, 25% of mortgage holders in negative equity, the government borrowing nearly a billion every two weeks to stay afloat, and all public sector and PAYE workers facing the third round of cuts in their wages, what does this corrupt and shameless government do?

They bail out their developer pals to the tune of tens of billions we don't have.

Congratulations. If you are an Irish taxpayer, you have just been heisted to the tune of around 35,000 euro. And that will go to bail out Liam Carroll, Sean Dunne and their odious ilk, who gambled and lost on a punt that the property prices they inflated would keep ballooning forever.

They've done this by propping up the corrupt bankers who gave them the preposterous sums in the first place. No room for capitalism here - no chance of watching these banks and their shoddy speculator customers go to the wall.

No, when it's the elites involved, it's time to bail them out with YOUR money.

Don't buy for a minute the nonsense that they need to keep these banks afloat. They do not. There are other, cleaner, banks in this country already. I bank with one, and I urge you to do likewise.

See this for what it is - corporate welfare for the guys in Fianna Fail's Galway tent. The guys who charged you half a million for a thrown together house in the middle of nowhere two years ago. The guys who handed over brown envelopes to the likes of Liam Lawler to get the fields they were built on rezoned.

Do you want to give 35 grand to those people? Do you want to keep on supporting the likes of Rody Molloy's pension, or John O'Donoghue's half a grand taxi jaunts across Heathrow airport, or the likes of Sean Fitzpatrick's holiday home in Marbella?

Do you?

If you do, sit on your hands and say nothing. Do nothing. They'll rob your money with impugnity and laugh at your foolishness.

But if you object to this, the greatest theft in Irish history since the Brits invaded and took the entire island, then you need to take action now.

Sorry about that. You will need to turn off 'Fair City' and actually DO SOMETHING.

Go on the NO TO NAMA march this Saturday if you can in Dublin. Better still, get in your TD's face. You know the fellow - jowly red face from too many free lunches at your expense. Go to his clinic, call his office, and roar down the phone at the prick for voting in favour of your being robbed.

Remember what they want from you. Your compliance. Your fear. Your resignation. Fuck that. Demand their resignation instead.

You could start by voting down the anti-democratic Lisbon Treaty. They badly need you to pass that. It's a great start. Then when they're hurting, demand a general election. And keep demanding until the scum are out of government. On the hustings, ask for written assurances from every candidate that they will back legislation to reverse NAMA, no matter what.

Don't take mealy-mouthed BS like 'We had to', 'systemic importance', 'going forward', or any of that oul blather. Get an assurance in writing that they will reverse NAMA or else resign yourself to writing them a big fat cheque for 35 grand.

Or watch this and learn what they're doing to you and your country:

SCAMA

Courtesy of Amhran Nua, I bring you the unofficial guide to NAMA (click for big):