The National Asset Management Agency has repeated that it will pursue developers who transferred assets from their own names to spouses or other family members in an effort to remove them from NAMA's scope.
In a statement issued this morning in response to a Prime Time Investigates programme on RTE last night, the agency also said that some transfers would fail to shelter the assets, because the people to whom the assets were transferred were also clients of NAMA and had given personal guarantees to the agency in respect of their debts.
Prime Time Investigates said almost all the transferred assets featured in the programme had no mortgages or charges registered against them, and were unencumbered. It added that some properties had mortgages cancelled just before their transfer to a spouse.
NAMA also said that in many cases where developers had lifestyles deemed inappropriate in the current circumstances, the assets involved were financed by banks not involved in NAMA.
The NAMA statement said the agency was 'acutely sensitive' to the risk that developers had tried or would try to transfer assets from their own names to spouses or other family members. It said it was pursuing developers to bring such assets back, and would do so in court if developers did not return the assets consensually.
It repeated that in three cases it had been agreed to reverse a combined total of €130m of such transfers.
