Cerberus paid less than half face value for €300m of troubled AIB loans in Project Fir

AIB sold the €300 million Project Fir loan book for €144.8 million in March of this year to New York vulture fund Cerberus, new filings have shown.Details of the sale, which remained confidential until now, were disclosed in financial accounts published by a subsidiary of Cerberus in Ireland, which said the portfolio of debts had “performed strongly during 2026”.Last year, The Irish Times reported AIB planned to sell non-performing loans, including debt that had soured during the Covid-19 pandemic and never recovered.These loans in the portfolio called Project Fir had an original value of €500 million, including mortgages, unsecured loans and small business loans. READ MOREIn April, news website The Currency first reported Cerberus and Link Financial had completed a deal for €300 million worth of non-performing loans from AIB’s Project Fir.New filings for Promontoria Acer Designated Activity Company have shown the Cerberus entity paid €144.8 million for the portfolio.The deal was agreed in November 2025, at which point the firm paid a deposit of €20.3 million for the debt linked to AIB, EBS and Haven Mortgages. The balance of €124.5 million was transferred in March 2026 to complete the deal, which was funded by a €146.3 million loan facility from Deutsche Bank.Promontoria Acer was previously used by Cerberus to acquire the Maple 3 portfolio of residential and commercial real estate loans, predominantly connected to Irish property, from AIB in 2023.[ Race kicks off for top ECB jobsOpens in new window ]Directors for the company said “the Maple 3 Portfolio and the Fir Portfolio have performed strongly during 2026”. They said collections up to the end of June 2026 totalled €43.6 million from the two portfolios combined. In 2025, Promontoria Acer made €33.6 million of collections from loans in the full year.Cerberus and Link Financial did not respond to a request for comment.A spokesman for AIB said the bank was focused on putting in place “sustainable solutions” for customers in difficulty. He said AIB had supported customers in 168,000 cases “through a comprehensive range of forbearance solutions”.Based on the bank’s latest annual report for 2025, as of December 2025 it had reduced its non-performing exposures from €31 billion in 2013 to €1.6 billion, a 2.2 per cent ratio.Promontoria Acer, the vehicle used by Cerberus to acquire Project Fir, was set up in 2022. The US investor has more than a dozen active Irish entities, which have been used to buy billions of euro of distressed debt.In recent weeks, accounts filed for two other crash-era vulture fund entities linked to Cerberus declared, for the first time, they have agreed to sell part of Project Aran, a €6 billion loan portfolio acquired in 2014 from Ulster Bank, and the €6.25 billion Project Arrow portfolio purchased from Nama in 2015.Project Aran and Project Arrow were two of the largest and highest-profile distressed loan books sold in Ireland in the aftermath of the 2008 property crash. Some of the debt in these portfolios was linked to well-known individuals, including former TD and former MEP Mick Wallace.