Full coverage: Vulture funds

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.

Irish banks and vulture funds' instincts for debt enforcement litigation are seemingly dormant, except for one fund which may be running out of time.

After changing hands twice, the debt of farmers who had borrowed from ACC ended up in a dual structure set up by CarVal under new rules governing Section 110 companies. How successful has it been in reducing the vulture fund’s Revenue bills?

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.

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.

A company set up to acquire Bank of Scotland loans called in a mortgage, failed to provide the deeds required for a refinance, then threatened to send in a receiver. It has now lost an interim court appeal – all for less than €300,000.

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.

The US vulture fund had acquired many large portfolios of distressed loans in Ireland in the past, but never so many secured on people’s homes. Why did CarVal do it this time, and where does this leave borrowers?