The National Asset Management Agency said today it has approved salaries of €200,000 a year for two property developers.

In an appearance before the Dáil Committee of Public Accounts, senior executives from the State loans agency declined to disclose the identities of the two developers. It said that the two debtors were managing "multibillion" euro portfolios.

Nama said that it have approved salaries, mostly between €70,000 and €100,000 a year, to between 110 and 120 developers by the end of the year, once the business plans of the top 188 debtors it will manage directly are approved.

Frank Daly, chairman of Nama, told the committee that the approval of these salaries was not popular but that the agency had to get the best commercial return for the taxpayer.

"It is not making us popular but that is the reality of where we," he said.

"We don't really see any portfolio in Nama that would result in a big payday for any developer in three, four, six years," said Mr Daly.

There will be also some changes to the structure of the National Asset Management Agency arising from the recent external review of the agency but nothing significant, Mr Daly said.

He declined to disclose details about the recommendations made by former HSBC chief executive Mike Geoghegan in his two-week review of the agency earlier this month.

"We can expect some changes to the structure of the agency," Mr Daly told the committee in response to questions from Fine Gael TD Eoghan Murphy.

Mr Murphy referred to a statement by accountant Peter Stewart when he resigned from the Nama board earlier this month, in which he said that the Geoghegan review should be "a watershed in the life of Nama" and result in "significant changes to the structures of the agency".

"That certainly would not be my view," said Mr Daly in response to Mr Stewart's statement.

Mr Daly said that he had "no great problem" with Mr Geoghegan's recommendations but that there were "one or two" that he would like to discuss with him.

The recommendations are being considered by the Nama board and the Minister, he said.

Mr Geoghegan had full private access to each board member and senior executive during the review, which he agreed to carry out on the basis that his recommendations would remain private.

Asked about the sale of Irish bank assets by Royal Bank of Scotland and Lloyds through Ulster Bank and Bank of Scotland (Ireland), Mr McDonagh said that Nama was "looking very closely" at what banks are trying to deleverage in Ireland.

"We believe there is a certain element of dumping going on in the Irish market," said Mr McDonagh.

The agency has completed its first financing of commercial property purchases to help stimulate activity in the property market.

Mr McDonagh told the committee the agency's programme of providing finance to purchasers of its commercial properties "is likely to gain significant momentum next year as more properties are offered to the market".

Under the new initiative, Nama will provide up to 70 per cent "vendor debt finance" to purchasers of commercial property under the control of its debtors or receivers appointed to properties and businesses by the agency.

Mr McDonagh said the agency had a €5.3 billion exposure to the Irish commercial property market and it was reviewing "a number of strategies" in order to generate cash from this portfolio, including providing vendor finance to purchasers.

He confirmed Nama had recently acquired close to €2 billion more in loans from the banks, bringing the agency's total portfolio to €74.2 billion. The agency has paid five financial institutions a total of €31.7 billion for the loans linked to about 650 debtors.

Mr McDonagh said the average discount of 58 per cent would not materially change arising from the purchase of the additional loans.

Nama has assessed business plans for 143 of the top 188 debtors which the agency will manage directly. About 30 per cent of these debtors have been subject to full or partial enforcement, Mr McDonagh said. Some 91 insolvency appointments have been made.

The agency was set up by the Government in 2009 to purge the banks of their most toxic loans - borrowings linked to land and development loans and related borrowings. The discounts applied to the loans forced the Government to recapitalise the banks pushing four of the six domestic banks into State control.

Nama has approved loan advances of more than €900 million to developers to complete projects and asset sales of more than €4.6 billion, allowing the agency to repay €1.55 billion of debts owing to the banks through the purchase of the loans.

Mr McDonagh said Nama expects to be in a position to make a further substantial repayment on its borrowings before the end of the year.

He told the committee that developers are legally obliged to repay all €74.2 billion of the debt owing to the agency but said that property values have fallen by about 60 per cent in Ireland from peak.

Mr McDonagh told the committee that there was "no pot of gold" beyond the properties underlying the loans and that the agency would not take "gratuitous" court actions against developers and waste taxpayers' money when they had no further cash to repay loans.

"If we were to enforce against each and every debtor and sold the property securing the loans, we know that we would realise only the current value of the property collateral as the debtor has no other assets and the pursuit of debtors would not be economic," he said.

"Frankly, in the case of some debtors, this is all that we can ever hope to recover and, in some of these cases, we have initiated, or expect to initiate, enforcement, but rest assured we will pursue every penny where it makes economic sense to do so."

Mr McDonagh said that Nama may offer developers incentives to repay the debts. For example, if they were to recover the acquisition price Nama paid for the loan plus a further 10 per cent, then it may allow the developer retain 10 cent in every euro achieved about that level.

"Debtors will not be allowed to walk away from their debts as soon as they reach the initial repayment targets set for them; these targets are the very least that they must achieve," he said.

"If the Irish and other property markets should experience any price gains over the next five to seven years, debtors will be in a position to repay well in excess of their initial milestone targets and Nama will capture that."

Mr McDonagh said that Nama was establishing a panel of loan brokers in each jurisdiction where it held assets to sell loans packaged in different ways, including the sale of the loans of a single developer.

Mr McDonagh said that there were interested parties considering "credible offers" to complete the half-built building on the north Dublin docklands that had been earmarked as the new head office of Anglo Irish Bank.

Talks on a deal to complete the building were at a "very sensitive stage", but Nama hoped the process would be concluded by the end of next month. Four banks and four receivers were involved in the development side and Nama was trying to simplify this to deal with one receiver.

Mr McDonagh said that nobody was more anxious than Nama to ensure the completion of the building as it was becoming "a landscape photo" for Ireland internationally and that overseas companies visiting Nama had asked their taxis to drive past the skeletal building to look at it.