Full coverage: Cerberus

The Irish financial system has so far paid Cerberus €1 billion to make €10 billion of bad debt go away, plus another comparable amount to the global banks that have backed the US vulture fund. Was it a price worth paying?

Nama and Ulster Bank were the biggest early sellers of non-performing loans to the US vulture fund, along with European banks. With the benefit of hindsight, how do those deals compare?

A decade on from early deals in the UK, the US vulture fund’s tax-efficient Irish subsidiaries have hoovered up bad debt from Germany to Cyprus. But how profitable are they?

The US investment firm is liquidating the first wave of vehicles it used to acquire billions of euros' worth of Irish debt after the financial crisis. A cash-flow analysis reveals how much it has made from assets offloaded by Nama and the banks.

2020 was a mixed bag for the US vulture fund, with collections and valuations slowing down at some of the SPVs used to buy distressed loans here. Initial figures for 2021 show a clear bounce.

The Dublin vehicle established by Cerberus to digest property-backed debt with a face value of £1.4 billion in Northern Ireland has come to the end of its life, revealing how much profit the US vulture fund has drawn from the deal.

Since the €24m write-down of former Ulster Bank loans in August, accounts trickling in from the US vulture fund’s Irish subsidiaries had shown poor performance in 2020. Until now. This is the story of how Cerberus made a comeback.

Since the start of the pandemic, the US vulture fund has written down millions off the value of bad loans acquired from AIB in Northern Ireland – but reported no Covid-19 impact on its latest Irish-owned Spanish landlord business.

Pandemic-hit debt collections have forced the US vulture fund to renegotiate some of its own loans with Morgan Stanley and Deutsche Bank. The worst cases to date have a common denominator: Ulster Bank.

Cerberus has been one of the most active vulture funds in Ireland since the financial crash. But with Covid impacting debt collections, a key Irish subsidiary has been deep in talks with Deutsch Bank over a debt extension.