A most distressed country

Gleann Riada is a private estate partly controlled by Ireland’s National Asset Management Agency, the body created in 2009 in the wake of the financial collapse to handle distressed assets.

The first phase of Nama’s operation involved the acquisition and transfer of over €71 billion in loan assets involving 850 debtors and more than 11,000 individual loans collateralised by 16,000 individual properties. Nama began life with a very large balance sheet and has been given the task of managing it down to zero as soon as commercially possible. Yesterday, it announced it had sold £90m of property in Northern Ireland in three years, where it is owed £100m.