Monday, 25 June 2012

How the Irish taxpayers are financing a hole in the ground in Chicago



I picked up this shocking story from the South of Dub blog:

The rubble-strewn Chicago lot where North America's tallest residential building was to have been built is turning into an international money pit.

Four years after construction stopped, leaving only a big foundation dug to support the planned 150-story Chicago Spire, an Irish government agency that subsequently bought the soured debt as part of the country's bank bailout still holds the loan on its books, according to people familiar with the property.

Now, Ireland's National Asset Management Agency, which took on the debt from the defunct Anglo Irish Bank Corp., is running up a big tab paying for property expenses that will be nearly $3 million by the end of this year. A Cook County judge in March approved the latest $1.2 million requested by a receiver, which will go for such expenses as insurance, back taxes and even the operations of a bathroom on a nearby bridge.


The Irish government starts by guaranteeing the unsecured bonds of Anglo-Irish Bank, ensuring that no one who invested in that wretched bank loses a penny. It ends with the Irish government, through is bank resolution agency, paying for the expenses related to a failed property scheme in the United States. And who is the loser here - the Irish tax payer.

Apparently, Jimmy Carr is Irish. I bet he would have found a way out of this financial mess. No more attempts at humor, Jimmy. Get over to Dublin. The old country needs your scamming skils.

4 comments:

Anonymous said...

That video is surreal.

Ghastly Oik said...

That video is surreal.

Ha yeah. Toward the end its like a giant phallic symbol animated by Walt Disney all with a strange mystical sort of feel.

Mind you, if you visit the Rockefeller Centre in New York, on the ground floor there is a huge mural/sculpture showing the sky scraper's construction in a sort of Hollywood epic stylee, which gave me the impression old Rockefeller imagined himself as some sort of modern day Pharaoh.

Is that maybe some sort of masonic thingy or something?

Ghastly Oik said...

I think Jimmy is actually a plastic paddy and has spent most of his life in England and was even born here.

But he keeps an Irish passport in memory of his dear old da who the British forced to come to England and become a millionaire.

Kitz said...

Just liike the four children of Tony Blair who all have Irish passports ( really ) .Handy if you are nom domiciled and benefit from all daddy's. trust funds .