The financial crisis and its fall-out exposed the egregious securitisation of high-risk home loans and the exploitation of Irish tax loopholes by global vulture funds. A recent deal unveiled by The Currency last week brings back the memories.
CarVal agreed to buy €800m worth of home loans from Ulster Bank two years ago. In the process, the US vulture fund has now revealed the discount obtained, its tax strategy – and the risk it sees Sinn Féin posing to its investors.
When the Double Irish was shuttered, it was replaced with the Green Jersey and the utilisation of intercompany debt structures. It fits a familiar pattern: when one tax loophole closes, another one is usually prised open.
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.
New financial information adds complexity to the structure of loans advanced by investors in National Broadband Ireland, whose chairman David McCourt is now separately borrowing against related assets.
It might not be immediately obvious but there is a strong link between the Glasgow climate conference and the Central Bank's mortgage rules. It is time to include energy efficiency and commuting factors into the real cost of a mortgaged property – not to mention their value to wider society.
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.
A husband and wife stopped paying their mortgage in 2017. Instead, deploying a playbook devised by so-called “charlatans” and “fraudsters”, they made 27 arguments as to why they should not have to pay the money. The result? A repossession order.
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.
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.
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