Cerberus Capital Management: Purchase of Distressed Assets

Debate between Corri Wilson and George Kerevan

Wednesday 22nd February 2017 Westminster Hall

[George Kerevan]

I agree, and the hon. Gentleman gets to the heart of the issue that we want to bring before Treasury Ministers, which is that even when loans were initially regulated, they can be sold on to unregulated parties, such as Cerberus, at which point there are no guarantees about the behaviour of those companies and how customers will be treated.

[Corri Wilson (Ayr, Carrick and Cumnock) (SNP)]

Will my hon. Friend give way?

[George Kerevan]

If my hon. Friend will forgive me, I will not, because I need to develop my case a little so that the Minister knows where I am going.

Cerberus has taken advantage of the situation. It is now the biggest purchaser of distressed real estate debt in Europe. It has acquired loans from such banks as Santander, RBS, Clydesdale, Yorkshire, Lloyds and banks in Italy and Scandinavia. It purchased £13.3 billion-worth of Northern Rock mortgages in 2015. Cerberus has also—we may come to this, and I will treat it in a very gentle fashion—purchased the Northern Ireland loan book of the National Asset Management Agency, which was set up by the Irish Government to dispose of property loans inherited from failed banks. We know that that is subject to serious fraud inquiry, and I will be very careful not to step into those legal areas.

The key question is how Cerberus makes its money. It claims to make a return for its investors in the range of 17% to 20% per annum, which is a staggering amount. The key way it makes its money is through tax avoidance. That is perfectly legal, but hardly the business model that the Treasury should be encouraging.

Cerberus manages distressed debt bought in the UK and Europe through a multiplicity of shell companies based largely in the Irish Republic. Those entities usually have the word “Promontoria” in their titles. They are, in turn, subsidiaries of other Cerberus Group companies registered in the Netherlands. Essentially, the Dutch companies lend money to their Irish subsidiaries at high interest rates to effect the asset purchases. That ensures that most of the cash generated from the purchased loans, or from liquidating distressed assets, flows back to the Netherlands in the form of transfer payments. According to an investigation by The Irish Times, six key Cerberus Promontoria holding companies in Ireland collectively paid a miserly €15,500 in tax in 2015.

The tax avoidance scheme means that Cerberus can offset the risk of purchasing so-called distressed loans. With the bulk of the financial risk removed, the true surplus profit for Cerberus comes from squeezing the distressed assets. That explains why Cerberus has been prepared to outbid rival US equity firms to acquire swathes of European distressed debt. My question to the Minister, and my key point, is this: has the Treasury made any calculation of the tax loss to the UK of the purchase by Cerberus of British so-called distressed assets, mortgages and properties? In particular, what corporation tax has Cerberus paid on the loan book purchased from United Kingdom Financial Investments Ltd in 2015—the Northern Rock portfolio?

[Corri Wilson]

Does my hon. Friend agree that trying to get answers from Cerberus Capital Management on this issue is like drawing blood from a stone? Attempts to communicate with it, by both myself and my constituents who have been impacted, have proven entirely fruitless, and calls for a meeting have fallen on deaf ears.

[George Kerevan]

My hon. Friend reveals something that many other Members, and people in other jurisdictions, have discovered: the company is unwilling to engage publically and is known to be highly secretive in its operations.

I want to continue on the issue of how Cerberus makes its cash. Cerberus is not a bank. Its business is not to make loans and earn interest. It is an investment fund that seeks a capital return, and that means it has to extract more value from the loan book than it paid to acquire it. Cerberus appoints local agents to review the loan books that it purchases, and it either squeezes more revenue by increasing lending rates or puts the client into liquidation in order to realise the value of the property.

Of course, it is theoretically open for SME clients to pay off their loan by refinancing with another lender. The problem is that Cerberus and its agents have no interest in letting that happen unless they can extract facility fees, which make such a transfer prohibitively expensive in most cases. Such fees often represent a significant percentage of the overall size of the original loan. For instance, the support group working with clients caught in the mis-selling of interest rate swaps by the Clydesdale and Yorkshire banks—clients transferred to Cerberus without their consent—reports that in many cases Cerberus or its agents refuse to accept full repayment of the loans. Instead they insist on adding backdated default interest and break clause costs, which were the subject of the original mis-selling.

I will now turn briefly, if you will indulge me, Mr Owen, to events in Northern Ireland. Again, I refer to the sale by NAMA—the Northern Ireland toxic bank agency—of property loans in the north of Ireland. That is subject to criminal investigation, and I will not go there, but I want to give some of the timings and the background of what happened.

The original bidder for the NAMA assets in Northern Ireland was a company called PIMCO, which is a California-based global investment company. PIMCO withdrew from that sale when it became aware of a £15 million private fee arrangement involving PIMCO’s US lawyers, Brown Rudnick, and two Irish individuals close to NAMA. After PIMCO withdrew, Cerberus had an unsolicited approach by agents acting on behalf of NAMA itself on 6 February 2014. Barely a week later, on 14 February 2014, Cerberus asked to be, and was, admitted to the bidding process for the NAMA loan book. Cerberus submitted a bid of £1.24 billion on 1 April 2014, a scant six weeks after entering the bidding process. The Cerberus bid was accepted on 3 April. Altogether, that is a breathtaking pace for a purchase of that magnitude—from entering into discussions on 6 February to the winning bid on 3 April.

We should note that at that point Cerberus had no investment history in Ireland, north or south. So why did the company feel confident enough to make such a large purchase—£1.24 billion of distressed loans in the north of Ireland? The answer is that Cerberus hired the firm of lawyers that had been employed by PIMCO, Brown Rudnick, which had previously been involved in the abortive sale. It did so on 24 March 2014, a mere week before Cerberus submitted its winning bid. Cerberus admitted to the Public Accounts Committee of the Irish Parliament that it paid Brown Rudnick £15 million for that one week’s work. Why was Cerberus willing to pay so much? As it admitted to the Irish Parliament, it was to gain detailed knowledge of the debts it was buying. However, NAMA had specifically banned prospective buyers from engaging directly with debtors or key stakeholders. Irish Deputies have accused Cerberus of paying Brown Rudnick so much—£15 million for one week’s work—precisely to obtain knowledge of debtors that it would not have been able to acquire through the formal bid process. Cerberus denies that—I put that on the record—but I leave it to others to assess why the company paid Brown Rudnick so much money for such a short amount of work.

That brings me to my next line of questioning to the Minister. Will he agree to conduct an inquiry into the NAMA sale of its assets in Northern Ireland once the legal proceedings have run their course? That way the issue can be aired, and if there was wrongdoing it can be found out, but if there was not everyone can be cleared. I make no allegations of illegality against Cerberus, but I do criticise its business methods and its growing stranglehold over so-called distressed assets in the UK and Europe. Its business model is bad for small companies and bad for the UK economy. In that context, I have a final question for the Minister: is there any substance to the persistent rumours that Cerberus has approached the Treasury with a view to buying debt from Her Majesty’s Revenue and Customs?