BUSINESS OPINION:AFTER FOUR days of spin and counter spin plus much eloquence from our learned friends, are we much the wiser about why Treasury Holdings is challenging Nama's move to appoint receivers to many of its property assets?

Of course we know the proximate reason for the challenge: Treasury believes Nama acted unreasonably and disproportionately last month when it demanded repayment of various loans and then proceeded to send in the receivers.

Treasury claims there are several reasons for this, but the main one being that they were in the middle of negotiations to sell many of these assets to two other property groups Macquarie and Hines.

It is for Ms Justice Mary Finlay Geoghegan to decide if Treasury have a case, but it is still not clear what they ultimately hope to achieve if they are successful in a judicial review.

Obviously they will want to win the judicial review, or the inevitable Supreme Court appeal if they don’t succeed in the High Court. But even if they do win, what does it change? Treasury is still insolvent and has lost the confidence of Nama, its main creditor.

If the various Nama-appointed receivers are thrown out as a result of a successful judicial review, they will presumably walk out the door of the various buildings, get reappointed by Nama, turn around and walk straight back in with a new mandate.

And this time around Treasury are not going to be any position to argue that they did not see what was coming or why.

By this logic, any victory or victories by Treasury would appear to have an overwhelming pyrrhic flavour. So why bother? What the litigation does do however, is buy Treasury some time. But time for what?

The answer to this question is presumably to put together another deal with Macquarie, or Hines or maybe another player. This time however, it would have to be a deal that Nama finds acceptable.

And what might this deal look like? Well we certainly know what it can’t look like: either of the two deals on the table in December, the details of which were revealed in the courts.

Macquarie offered to buy €570 million worth of loans with €67 million upfront and the balance paid for by fresh loans (vendor finance) from Nama itself. According to Nama the shareholders and management of Treasury would have benefited to the tune of €80 million and received management fees of €42 million over seven years.

The Hines deal was similar and also relied very heavily on vendor finance and was thus equally problematic because the net effect of vendor financing would be that Nama received a relative small amount of cash but still remain very heavily exposed, but with weakened security.

Treasury – and by association its shareholders Richard Barrett and Johnny Ronan – would by contrast have significantly improved their position, particularly if the deals had meant they did not have to reverse the so called Tail deal by which assets of €20.5 million were transferred out of the company ahead it going into Nama.

The agency has turned down both deals, but it would be remiss of it not to look at any fresh proposals. But they will have to be ones that Nama can defend and one suspects they would have to be proposals that saw a very significant amount of cash upfront, with a significant reduction in the risk carried by Nama.

Its not impossible that such a deal could be done at this late stage, but if one is done then the question that has to be asked, is why Treasury chose to do things the hard way?

And the explanation for this appears to be that Treasury is an Irish property company and this is the way property companies do things. There seems to be genuine surprise on the part of Treasury that Nama did not continue to negotiate with them even though the affidavits of both sides indicate that Treasury seemed to be relentlessly seeking advantage at Nama’s expense and ultimately patience gave out.

If that is the case then its move against Treasury will serve as a salutary warning to the various other developers trying to deals with Nama that State agencies do not play such games. Nor should they. Leaving aside the whole hornet’s nest of ethical business practices you only have to ask yourself why Nama came into existence in the first place to realise that there is nothing very clever about the games Irish property companies play.