Video: Éirígí Activists Target Avestus Vulture Sites In Sandyford And Kilmacud
Éirígí activists in South Dublin brought the ‘Vultures Out’ message to Avestus / Richmond Homes last weekend when they pasted dozens of posters to the hoardings of two building sites in Sandyford and Kilmacud.
Richmond Homes is the building arm of Avestus Capital Partners, which describes itself as a ‘real estate investment and asset manager’. In reality Avestus is a vehicle for the wealthy to amass even more wealth through speculative property deals - a vulture by any other name.
Avestus Capital Partners was established in 2010 by Thomas Dowd, Peter Donnelly, Olan Cremin and Mark O’Donnell. All four were previously directors of the investment firm Quinlan Private / Quinlan Partnership, along a fifth director, Derek Quinlan.
When it was established, Avestus took on Quinlan’s asset management business and staff, allowing it to begin operations with assets valued at a staggering eight billion euro.
Crucially, however, Avestus did not take liability for Quinlan loans with a nominal value of €489m. The responsibility for repaying these loans remained with Quinlan.
In 2010 NAMA acquired these loans at a 75% discount for €123.6m. Much, if not all, of the €366m ‘discount’ was ultimately paid for by the taxpayer via the bank bailout.
The Quinlan loans were sold off in eight bundles between 2011 and 2013. Seven of the bundles broke even or made a profit for NAMA. A single bundles of loans, known as ‘Project Nantes’, was sold at a loss of €10m by NAMA.
Remarkably Project Nantes included personal loans belonging to the directors of Quinlan / Avestus with a nominal value of €28.7m. NAMA paid €9.3m for these loans, with the taxpayer ultimately picking some or all of the €19.4m discount via the bank bailout.
The sale of the Project Nantes loans was subsequently investigated by the Office of the Auditor and Controller General, which published a damning report just as the Covid lockdown began, on March 19th, 2020.
Among other findings the report found that:
NAMA had violated its own sales policy when it failed to secure up-to-date valuations for the Project Nantes loans and associated properties.
NAMA chose to grant Clairvue ‘exclusivity’ in relation to Project Nantes instead of selling it on the open market.
NAMA failed to identify that the €9.4 million it had paid the banks for the property-backed personal debts of the Quinlan partners had not been built into the Board-approved refinancing target.
NAMA failed to see that the acquisition value of one of the loans underpinning the target had been understated by €16.1 million.
Had the full scope of the loan portfolio been consistently and accurately reflected in the original repayment target, the residual target to be achieved through the Project Nantes loan sale would have been of the order of €56 million - about €29 million more than was achieved in the sale to Clairvue.
The report also established that it was Avestus that introduced Clairvue Capital Partners to NAMA in as a possible buyer of Project Nantes in August 2011.
And most damning of all, the report confirmed that a director of Avestus was also a director of Clairvue. That director is the current Chief Financial Officer of Avestus, Mark Donnelly. NAMA claim that they unaware of Donnelly’s dual role.
Mark Donnelly, Chief Finance Officer of Avestus Captial, was found to also to be a director of Clairvue, the company that bought the under-priced Project Nantes from NAMA.
The building sites in Sandyford and Kilmacud that were targetted with posters by Éirígí activists last weekend are being developed by Richmond Homes / Avestus, who plan to build 600 ‘build to rent’ apartments on them.
The smaller site, consisting of 55 homes on the grounds of Kilmacud House, has already been sold to an unknown corporate landlord.
Éirígí has previously highlighted Avestus’s plan to squeeze 564 apartments onto the larger site beside the Stillorgan LUAS stop. Just 18 of these homes will be three-bed apartments. The remaining homes will be made up of tiny bedsits, one-bed and two-bed apartments.
This larger site was sold to Avestus by NAMA for €38m in February 2019, despite a high-profile campaign for it to be kept in public ownership for public housing - a campaign that Éirígí activists were centrally involved in.
Éirígí has consistently highlighted and opposed the exploitative nature of the current approach to housing. And we have also put forward UP Housing as a radical alternative that will deliver secure, affordable housing for all. If you like what we do and are interested in joining the fight for housing justice, join us today.