For some time now we have been seeking the Cabinet agendas for meetings from 1998, 1999 and 2000. We now have all agendas from April 1998 to July 2000. These records are available because of the 10-year rule in Section 19 of the FOI Act. This is the first time these documents have appeared in the public domain.
It should be noted that many of the industrial grants in these records have been redacted for commercial sensitivity reasons. I currently have an appeal with the information commissioner pending, arguing that since up to 12 years have passed since these meetings/grants took place, it is unlikely the records remain commercially sensitive.
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.
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.
[…] I have therefore always believed that, baring accident or mishap, I would live to a similar age as my grandparents. But I have never given that much thought to the quality of that life, and after spending so much time in the stroke ward I will now admit to thinking about it a little too much. I try to maintain a healthy lifestyle, I am a vegetarian for almost ten years now, have never smoked, am less than an occasional drinker, and am fitter now than at any time in the last five years thanks to the auspices of the good folks at DublinBikes. Beyond that there is little more that I can do, and thinking about the future is less than productive.
On December 22 1967, a group of schoolboys on their holidays began transmitting music and stories across the airwaves. The Irish Times noted that the transmissions had come from “somewhere south of the Liffey” and that the young boys had made two one hour broadcasts, at 8am and 12.30pm…
WORLD
New international report ‘Cash for Coverage’. It’s on bribery of journalists.
Glenn Greenwald on the US media silence after a UN report finds Israel ‘summarily executed’ a US citizen on board the Gaza flotilla.
[…] To this day, I’m still amazed by how the American media and U.S. Government responded to this incident, given the fact that it was painfully obvious from the start that the Israelis’ conduct was the behavior of a guilty party. The Israelis immediately seized all documentary evidence from the passengers showing what actually happened, blocked all media access to witnesses by detaining everyone on board (including journalists) for days, and then quickly released its own highly edited video — spliced to begin well into the middle of the Israeli attack — that was dutifully and unquestioningly shown over and over by the U.S. media to make it appear that the flotilla passengers were the first to become violent. That was a lie from the start, and it was an obvious lie.
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.
Minister Brian Lenihan was interviewed by Bloomberg yesterday. You can watch it here.
He’s extremely definite in his views, I’ll have to add a few quotes in the QFBL section for future reference. One in particular caught my attention. “The position with Allied Irish Bank is; it will be fully capitalised and transformed and restored into its greatness”. Poetry, minister Lenihan, poetry.
The DIRT scandal.
Foreign exchange overcharging.
Revelations of €8.6m additional overcharging on a range of products ranging from trust funds to student and graduate facilities, effecting more than 50,000 customers, following anonymous tip-offs to the Financial Regulator.
Insurance Corporation of Ireland (which, if memory serves, we’re still paying for to this day).
The findings of the Moriarty Tribunal in relation to the settling of a £1m overdraft for a Mr Charles Haughey.
NAMA’s purpose is to defer the fixing of the valuation of the loans as long as possible. It claims that it is paying prices reflecting “long term economic value”. This is an admission, of course, that the loans are not currently worth NAMA’s estimate.
Long after the Government has left office we will learn the real value of NAMA’s “assets”. So, too, will the Central Bank and the Financial Regulator. Only then will the cost of the Bank Bailout be known.
The Government devised NAMA. It has designated NAMA as exempt from Freedom of Information legislation. When this writer asked for information on the agreement between the Government and the Commission of the EU on the NAMA loan pricing mechanisms, the information was refused.
Everything of relevance in the possession of NAMA is a secret…