FOI - NAMA - Who thinks that the Dept of Finance will release anything substantial?

edanto

I'm interested in NAMA and I've put in a broad FOI request to the Dept of Finance.

I requested:

"Of particular interest to me would be records covering (i) draft legislation, (ii) meetings, (iii) decisions, and (iii) the terms of reference in relation to the establishment of NAMA"

They have stalled and just yesterday came back with a large bill, on top of the small fee that I've already paid.

What do you think? Is it worth paying to see, or are they likely to black out all the interesting bits? Anyone been down this road before?

Anyone interested in sharing the risk/cost and getting a copy of the results?

SkepticOne

I will split the cost.

edanto

Well that's very generous of you, thanks. I was hoping that someone would come along and do exactly what you have done.

Would there be any other takers? As you'll see from the letter, the Dept of Fin is looking to charge over €300, so I was thinking that if we could get 5 people involved then the cost is much less and I could take on the job of photocopying/distributing.

SkepticOne, great to have you on board!

Martyr

Would there be any other takers?

count me in.

P. Breathnach

I suspect that you might be wasting your time and your money. Anything that you might find interesting would have to be held back (justifiably) because of its potential impact on commercial decisions.

edanto

I'm worried about that too. I'm concerned that almost everything of interest will be blacked out and that we will waste our money.

Is there anyway to know in advance? Has anyone done this before?

The_Minister

P. Breathnach wrote: »

I suspect that you might be wasting your time and your money. Anything that you might find interesting would have to be held back (justifiably) because of its potential impact on commercial decisions.

Indeed.

The media will request this information anyway, and go over it with a fine-toothed comb.

Riskymove

The_Minister wrote: »

Indeed.

The media will request this information anyway, and go over it with a fine-toothed comb.

+1 was just going to say that....don't waste your cash and just wait for the Times or whoever to do this

Victor

SkepticOne wrote: »

I will split the cost.

Of course, you could just FoI the response given to edanto and only pay photocopying costs. :pac:

edanto

Finally something came back from this. Though almost everything of interest was blacked out.

Something that is of no use to me, but might be useful to someone else was the attendance list for the NAMA steering group meetings, most of the names mean nothing to me.

I can't run it through the copier/scanner because all of the pages have little plastic tags on them, but if anyone's particularly interested get in touch.