Month: October 2010

Bottom of the main business page from Friday’s Irish Times…

[Tazbell Holdings/Group] has won a tender from the Department of Justice to manage “the collection of overdue court-imposed fines”.

The contract, won by Dublin-based Tazbell, involves managing the collection of unpaid court fines through “proactive contact attempts” with the debtor. This will include “traditional credit management methods”, such as letters, phone calls and e-mails.

As the article also states, Tazbell is owned by Derek Quinlan, the well-known financier who’s currently selling his property on the exclusive Shrewsbury Road. He’s one of the top ten property investors heading into Nama via one of his other companies, Avestus.

The parent company over all his enterprises is registered on the Isle of Man. In August last year Quinlan took up permanent residence in Switzerland for “tax and personal reasons“.

Quinlan is also a director in Park Rite, which runs many of the car parks around the nation’s cities (Dublin alone: Arnotts, City Quay, Tallaght Hospital, St James’s Hospital, Fleet Street in Templebar, Mount Carmel Hospital, Parnell Street and a few more). On top of that Park Rite is the parent company of Dublin Street Parking Services. DSPS is an unlimited company not required to file accounts with the CRO. However, the Dublin City Council budget for 2009 shows that DSPS was paid almost €10m that year for “clamps, removals or car relocations” by the Council. It’s a clamping company contracted by the Council.

Quinlan – via Tazbell – also now has the contract for court fine debt collection. Oh, and he collects the toll on the M4-M6 motorway too via another company (a public-private partnership construction), in case you’re passing through.

So you can either pay to park with Tazbell or get clamped. Or you park in the pay-and-display… though you should be aware that if you overstay and catch a fine it’ll be Tazbell that’ll force you to cough up. Or park in one of the smaller car parks if you can find one… and good luck doing that as you rush into Tallaght Hospital, St James’s, Mount Carmel or University College Hospital Galway.

All the while he pays tax in Switzerland, bases his parent company in the Isle of Man as the taxpayer – the same one he’s clamping, charging and chasing for fines – takes on his loans through Nama.

Larrrrrvley innit?

Audio recording of the so-called ‘Chimpgate‘ conference call between Brian Lenihan and 300 investors arranged by Citibank is embedded below. The audio quality is awful, anyone who can clean it up get in touch and I’ll send you a copy. I advise use of the best headphones you can get your hands on, the sound gets really bad at points but you can make out most of it…

EDIT: First posted on Zerohedge. Downloaded and sent on to us by a friend of the blog. Seems this is the second 45 minutes of the call following problems with the first half (which supposed included the heckling)…

Zerohedge claims…

And while Ireland is still refusing to acknowledge that anything out of the ordinary happened [regards heckling], and Citi has most certainly deleted any copies of the first part of the conference call, the second part of the call was obtained by Zero Hedge. What is obvious from the call is the extreme sensitivity the operators and organizers have toward any open line, while proffering extreme apologies for the confusion that was prevalent on Part 1 of the call, which apparently lasted for 45 minutes (the entire call ended up being one hour thirty minutes, after it was supposed to be half that duration).

The Q&A starts at 9 minutes, prior to that it’s mainly John Corrigan of the NTMA and Minister Lenihan reeling off their standard lines. 45 minutes in total.

If the audio bar isn’t working try this link.

I’m no expert on this topic but perhaps others may have a interest in a listen.

Business hacks and bloggers say the first half of the call is never likely to emerge.

Now, can we as a society chill on the use of ‘-gate’? Puh-leez.

I’m in the process of reading and annotating the C&AG report for 2009, which was published about two weeks back. It’s about 600 pages in total and written in a way that makes understanding a chronology of events quite difficult. It’s taking a while.

On page 314 (vol. 2) in the ‘Leasing of Social Housing’ chapter the C&AG notes the Department of Environment’s comments on the poor up-take of a new leasing scheme. This scheme is an initiative similar to the Rental Accommodation Scheme and became available in 2004. The difference between it and the RAS is it focuses on long-term leasing of private rented housing and is available to all in need of social housing support not just people in receipt of rental supplement for more than 18 months.

“The department believes the slow uptake is due to uncertainty in the property market and the inclusion of a large number of property owners in the NAMA process. It expects that by the end of 2010 an increased supply of of suitable properties will become available for leasing through NAMA.”

Interesting, my emphasis obviously. The ‘through’ word is worth noting. I dropped a mail to the blogosphere’s resident NAMA correspondent, Jag Singh, and he thought it interesting too.

Scared ya, didn’t I?

He’s still a sitting TD, in case you’d forgotten. Or at least he’s still being paid and claiming expenses as a sitting TD. Though he has hardly spoken in the Dáil for two years.

… is on Ireland today. It’s written in hard-hitting language.

However, this paragraph slightly undermines the authority of piece;

When a country has gone bust in such spectacular fashion, the causes for its crisis are bound to range far and wide. Primary among them we might count an overreliance on property prices both for the feelgood factor and for public revenues. During the boom, Dublin cut income and corporation tax and relied increasingly on property taxes.

We never had a property tax, at least not a residential property tax. In fact, if we did it probably would have cooled things down and stopped the bubble inflating to the extent it did. I’d guess the author was referring to stamp duty… but that’s a once-off payment, not a tax. Or perhaps I’m being too finicky and should accept ‘property tax’ to mean taxes raised from property development as opposed to property purchase.

Either way, the lack of taxes on property – and the multiple loopholes and tax breaks made available to developers – is what inflated the property market. The banks loan ‘policies’ contributed too, obviously. I’m not sure where property taxes came into it. Perhaps “Dublin cut income and corporation tax and relied increasingly on property development to keep money flowing around the economy”, would be more accurate. Or perhaps I’m wrong. Let me know, if so.

Footnote: this paragraph raised a smile;

As Pete Lunn of Dublin’s Economic and Social Research Institute notes, the elite directing the Irish economy is more tightly closed than an oyster shell – so that the top civil servant in the department of finance would normally expect his tenure to be followed by a stint as chief central banker. Policymakers shrank from calling the property bubble a bubble until it had popped. And when it had burst, they accepted too easily the bankers’ claims that they were merely short of liquidity rather than utterly bust.

You read that right, the ESRI lamenting that an oyster-like elite was allowed to form a group-think which resulted in a lack of dissenting voices.

A report by Carol Jordan broadcast in the last few days on CNN about ghost estates, shot in east Cork. It features Cian O’Callaghan of NÌRSA and Ireland After Nama.

Gav blogged photos of estates in the same region back in 2008.