NTMA plans to raise €10bn this year
The successful resumption of full access to market funding by Ireland this year will require many things to go right. Some are within our control and some are in the gift others.
One of the areas in which we can exert some control is the supply of Irish bonds which puts Ireland in a position to influence the cost of our borrowings. It is an area in which the National Treasury Management Agency appears to be enjoying some success.
Bank of Ireland’s Dan McLoughlin (inset) estimates that over the next two years, Ireland will have to raise €40 billion to meet bond redemptions and exchequer deficits. “This week’s issuance of €2.5 billion of five-year bonds combined with the remaining troika funds available to us and the NTMA’s cash-in-hand and liquid assets at the end of 2012 means that right now, Ireland has about €37.5 billion in funding available to meet costs over the next two years, so we are in a relatively strong position as we prepare to resume full market access,” he concludes.
In theory, Ireland really only has to raise another €2.5 billion in the market over the next two years.
It would only make sense to raise more than that if we can do so at a cheaper rate than we pay for the bailout money, which is about 3.5 per cent.
Given that €7 billion worth of bids were received on Tuesday and the money was raised at 3.3 per cent, there seems to be the potential to force yields down a good bit further over the coming year.
The NTMA would appear to believe that this will be the case as it has indicated that it plans to raise €10 billion in the market this year.
The indicative timetable contained in the troika review of the Irish programme given to German parliamentarians yesterday – ahead of their Irish counterparts as usual – sees the NTMA issuing €3 billion worth of long-term bonds in the first quarter of the year, followed by €2.5 billion in the second and then €2 billion in each of the third and fourth quarter.
Wedge driven between neighbours
Even when you're the richest man in all of the North, with a massively successful business and a peerage to boot, the small things can still make you very cross.
In this vein, judgment emerged just before Christmas in a case involving Eddie Haughey's (Lord Ballyedmond, above)Norbrook Laboratories and two of his neighbours. The suit concerned a kind of land grab, albeit on a very, very tiny scale.
Veterinary medicine giant Norbrook took the action against its Newry neighbours, Dr Peter Maguire and Gerard Trainor, in 2006, seeking a declaration on who owned two small pieces of land.
One piece was described as "a narrow wedge of land, 2.96 metres at its widest tapering to nothing", while the second was a " strip" almost six metres at its widest and 3.17 metres at its narrowest.
In relation to the wedge, it was accepted that the only things to be found on it were "plants, save for the oil tank behind Mr Trainor's garage". The strip involved a rock face at one end.
The issue before Mr Justice Donnell Deeny in Belfast's High Court was whether the defendants (a consultant anaesthetist and a solicitor respectively) could benefit from adverse possession rules, whereby one gains ownership over a property through habitual use while the original owner in effect allows his rights to lapse. This meant the defendants had to show that they had dealt with the land "as an occupying owner might have been expected to deal with it".
After hearing lots of evidence on fences, walls, dogs being tied up, rhubarb and berries being picked and the location of oil tanks, Mr Justice Deeny found that Norbrook had engaged in acts of "discontinuance of possession" in relation to the contested land, including the construction of a fence and a wall in a particular location.
Balancing against this were "acts of continuance of possession", which were sufficient to win over the judge to the defendants' cause.
He found that even though Dr Maguire's grandfather may have been aware of the boundaries of his land many years ago, "this lore did not survive him".
Lord Ballyedmond did not appear in support of his company's efforts.
Who owns the end of a garden is the kind of thing that doesn't seem very important when you're not one of the parties claiming ownership, but which can be crucial when you are.
Running for six years and involving a long list of lawyers and experts, such actions are, of course, expensive, although that may not trouble Lord Ballyedmond, who is estimated to preside over a fortune of close to £400 million (€483 million), all made through the business he founded.
It does seem a touch ironic, however, that even fortunes of this magnitude cannot buy over two neighbours who want to keep their view just as it is.
Tullow Oil's new Spring in its step
Last month Tullow Oil put its natural gas-producing wells in the North Sea and its Asian interests on the block.
The company hopes to sign a deal in relation to the Asian operations by the end of the first quarter and to complete it by the end of the year. It has also indicated it hopes to dispose of the North Sea gas wells, which produce the equivalent of 18,000 barrels of oil a day, over the same time frame.
The move came as the company announced it was buying Norwegian oil exploration and production business Spring Energy, which has assets stretching along the Scandinavian country's Atlantic and Arctic Sea coasts. The sale of the gas production and exploration operations is really the final stage in what has been an ongoing shift in emphasis at Tullow. The company's real focus has been on prospecting for oil, and it walked away from its Georgetown licence in Guyana last month because it only contained commercial quantities of gas. Tullow emphasised the point in a trading statement yesterday, saying that the sale of its gas production and exploration interests was specifically to allow it to focus on "light oil in Africa and the Atlantic margins". The same statement indicated that Tullow was enthusiastic about its new property, Spring Energy, which it said had "28 exciting offshore exploration licences across Norway's continental shelf in the highly prospective North Atlantic". Tullow has had Norway in its sights for a while. Last year, before it did the Spring Energy deal, it pre-qualified as an operator on the Scandinavian country's continental shelf, an initial step in the process of getting licensed there. Buying somebody with an existing operation in Norway allows Tullow to speed up building a presence there.
