US company Cerberus has appointed receivers to Ballybay Estates, one of the companies whose debts it bought through the National Asset Management Agency’s Project Eagle sale, to recover a €7 million loan, the Irish Times reported. New York-based Cerberus Capital Management’s €1.6 billion purchase of the Project Eagle loans is caught in a row over claims that a number of Belfast political and business figures were to receive payment as a result of the deal. The company itself denies any wrongdoing.
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Irish consumers still feel “somewhat remote” from reports of a strong domestic recovery, according to the latest KBC Bank Ireland/ESRI consumer sentiment survey, the Irish Times reported. The survey’s headline index fell marginally to 100.6 in September from 101.1 the previous month. This probably reflects the difficulty the average consumer has in making sense of seemingly contradictory recent signals both in relation to economic prospects generally and their own financial circumstances, the report’s authors said.
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Permanent TSB has established a Mortgage Product Review Group to scrutinise its suite of home loans and to establish whether there are any cases where the contractual terms and conditions attached to mortgage accounts were not being fully honoured by the bank, the Irish Times reported. Ger Mitchell, a member of PTSB’s executive committee, is to lead the review supported by senior manager Gillian O’Shea along with a bank team and external independent expertise in the areas of conduct risk and product design.
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Banks, insurance companies and investment funds in Ireland will have to pay an extra €15 million this year to help cover the running costs of their regulator, the Central Bank of Ireland. This represents a 29 per cent rise in the industry’s contribution to the Central Bank’s running costs, which will increase to €66 million from €51.1 million in 2014. This raises the prospect of banks and insurance companies passing on the cost to their customers by way of higher fees or premiums.
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The additional state borrowing undertaken as part of the bank bailout has already cost the state almost €9 billion to service, according to the report of the Comptroller & Auditor General, the Irish Times reported. This cost largely offsets all the income which the state received from the banks in return for giving them the guarantee. The C&AG calculates that the total cost of the bailout has been €60 billion so far for the State.
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Pretax losses at Irish-based oil and gas exploration company Providence Resources widened in the six months ending June 30th as the group said it was in talks with its lender to extend its debt facility. Providence reported a first-half pretax loss of €8.42 million as against €3.37 million for the same period a year earlier with a loss per share of 7.94 cents versus 5.22 cents in the first six months of 2014. The Tony O’Reilly-headed group said that as with other explorers, Providence has been hit by the fall in oil prices but said it remained focused on its core Irish-centric strategy.
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Northern MLAs Due At Nama Hearing

Members of the Northern Ireland Assembly will witness the Dáil Committee on Public Accounts quiz Nama on the controversial €1.6 billion Project Eagle loan sale later this week, the Irish Times reported. The Dáil committee is due to question the agency on Thursday about the sale of debts due to it from mainly Northern-based borrowers to US investment fund Cerberus in early 2014. Members of the Northern Ireland Assembly’s finance and personnel committee, which is carrying out its own investigation, are due to attend Thursday’s Leinster House hearings.
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The Bank of Ireland is seeking to have two relatives of property developer Tom McFeely made bankrupt in Northern Ireland, the Irish Times reported. The move comes just months after Mr McFeely, the developer behind the Priory Hall complex in Dublin, was blocked from emerging from bankruptcy by the Irish Courts. Having failed in an attempt to be made bankrupt in the UK in 2012, Mr McFeely was made a bankrupt in the Republic.
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A tax bill for about €150 million, mainly arising from unpaid income tax owed by the former Anglo Irish Bank, is likely to be appealed by the special liquidators to the Irish Bank Resolution Corporation, the State-owned entity into which Anglo was subsumed, the Irish Times reported. The massive tax bill, thought to be one of the largest ever submitted to a State- owned body, arises in the main from the interpretation of rules in relation to income tax and straddles the period before and after the former bank was nationalised.
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Ireland is to become one of the first countries to introduce measures aimed at ensuring multinationals disclose more information to tax authorities, the Irish Times reported. In the upcoming budget, the Government will introduce moves obliging multinationals to draft country-by-country reports on their global activities, according to sources. If enacted the new rules could affect our biggest corporations, such as CRH, Glanbia, Kerry and Ryanair, as well as major foreign multinationals that have located their global headquarters here over recent years for tax reasons.
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