Former Northern Ireland first minister Peter Robinson has said he neither expected nor received a single penny from the £1bn-plus sell-off of properties to aUS investment firm.
The Democratic Unionist party leader was appearing before the Northern Ireland assembly’s finance committee to answer allegations that he personally benefited from the region’s biggest ever property sale.
Robinson, who temporarily stepped down as first minister last month, has strenuously denied allegations that he was to receive any payment or benefit from a deal with the US private equity firm Cerberus Capital for National Asset Management Agency (Nama) properties that once belonged to property speculators from the Irish Republic.
The Nama sell-off is the subject of a criminal investigation, with the UK’s National Crime Agency assessing whether any politician benefited financially from the sale. It also the subject of a Securities and Exchange Commission inquiry in the US.
Robinson told the finance committee on Wednesday: “I neither received, expected to receive, sought nor was I offered one single penny as a result of the Nama sale.”
Given the depressed state of the local property market a couple of years ago, Robinson said he was solely “motivated by what was in the best interests of our economy”. He added: “It would have been a dereliction of my duty not to seek to protect the position of Northern Ireland.”
The DUP leader said the allegations levelled both south of the border in the Irish parliament by leftwing deputy Mick Wallace and in Northern Ireland by hardline Ulster loyalist activist Jamie Bryson, “lack credibility and can have no evidential basis”.
Wallace claimed under Dáil parliamentary privilege that £7m was set aside in an Isle of Man bank account for fixers and politicians to enable Cerebrus to purchase the properties. The firm, whose leading executives include former US vice-president Dan Quayle, have strongly denied any involvement in kickback payments to politicians, lawyers or financial advisers in Northern Ireland to smooth the passage of the sale.
Robinson told the committee that Bryson’s attendance at a previous hearing was a “scripted performance was little short of pantomime. It is outrageous that such scurrilous and unfounded allegations can be made without providing one iota of evidence”.
During questions from the committee chaired by Sinn Féin’s Daithí McKay, Robinson said his main partner in the Stormont government, the deputy first minister, Martin McGuinness, was made aware about negotiations with Cerebrus and another US investment firm, Pimco.
Robinson claimed he had an email confirming McGuinness knew about a “memo of understanding” between the government and Pimco during negotiations leading up the sale in 2014.
Since the controversy flared up in June when Wallace first made his allegations in the Dáil, McGuinness has insisted he was kept in the dark about the negotiations leading to the sale of the £1bn-property portfolio.
In his evidence however on Wednesday, Robinson sought to defend the deputy first minister to a certain extent about who knew what in relation to the negotiations.
“I don’t think he was trying to mislead this committee – I think he genuinely had no recollection of these events,” Robinson said, adding: “We get flooded with things from other departments.”
The former first minister emphasised that he was willing to be interviewed by both the National Crime Agency and the Police Service of Northern Ireland as part of their inquiries into claims of corruption swirling around the Nama sell-off.
