The National Asset Management Agency (Nama) earned €80 million profit in the nine months to the end of September, new figures show.
The agency, set up in 2010 to bail out Irish banks during a financial crisis, generated €207 million in the first three quarters of last year, it noted in a report to Minister for Finance Paschal Donohoe.
It recorded a profit after tax of €80 million over the nine months ending September 30th, against €35.5 million during the same period in 2023.
Laws establishing the agency require it to write to the minister every three months to report on its performance.
Nama said it expects to return €5.2 million to the exchequer, including a €4.8 billion surplus and €400 million in taxes.
Total cash generated since it was founded comes to €48 billion. It has handed over €4.65 billion so far, including €400 million in December.
The agency noted that since 2014 it has helped fund 41,528 new homes, 202 of them last year. Work is under way on a further 240.
Nama has pledged almost 3,000 homes on properties it controls to city and county councils for social housing.
The State agency originally paid almost €32 billion for €70 billion worth of property-linked debt from Irish banks faced with insolvency in 2010 after fuelling a credit bubble.
It took over debts due from developers and land speculators, along with the security that those borrowers had pledged, which mostly consisted of the properties that they had borrowed the money to buy.
This gave Nama the right to collect the sums due from the borrowers, or to take control of the properties used to secure the loans.
Nama subsequently sold many of those debts to vulture funds and private equity investors or appointed its own receivers to properties pledged as security.
The Government will wind up Nama at the end of this year, despite November’s election stalling the required legislation.
The agency told the Minister it was “working with the National Treasury Management Agency on the establishment of the resolution unit to manage residual Nama activity from 2026″.
The new body will take over whatever is left of Nama’s activities and the Irish Bank Resolution Corporation (IBRC), a separate entity established to allow the wind up of failed lenders Anglo Irish Bank and Irish Nationwide.
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