The High Court hearing into the application for examinership by property developer Liam Carroll's Zoe group has been adjourned until Monday.
The court today heard ACCBank describe Zoe's business plan as 'flawed' and 'simply a deferred receivership'.
The future of the property market was again the focus of debate at the hearing into Liam Carroll's second application for court protection.
Lyndon McCann, senior counsel for ACC, pointed to a finding of UCD professor Morgan Kelly that property prices could stay at 50% of their peak values for a decade. Judge Frank Clarke referred to Professor Kelly as 'the leading proponent of the non-soft landing school' and noted that 'we have all felt the bumps at this stage'.
Later, in reply, senior counsel for Zoe Bill Shipsey said ACC must not have read Professor Kelly's work in 2007 as its loans to the Carroll group were made in 2007 and 2008. He said ACC was 'last to the party and wanted to be first out of the party'.
One of ACC's objections was that the terms of Zoe's business plan involved a two-year moratorium on interest payments, but if its banks' loans were 'NAMA-ed' there was no indication of how NAMA would approach these loans and ACC would end being owed more than it is now at the end of that period.
Judge Frank Clarke adjourned the hearing until Monday and said a ruling could take seven days after that to deliver. That would mean a ruling just before the Dáil is due to debate the NAMA legislation.
