Mr. John Corrigan:

They publish their methodologies, which vary from agency to agency. They have a scoring mechanism for various factors which they see as being relevant. For example, the nominal rate of GDP growth is a factor. What has weighed us down in recent years has clearly been the banking problem. Moody's seems to have moved on from that now and is taking a somewhat more positive outlook. They do publish quite extensive frameworks, but at the end of the day not all investors rely on the credit rating agencies as such. Most of the bigger institutional investors have their own internal credit appraisal procedures and they would go by them. Therefore, there can be quite a divergence of views, which is what makes a two-way market.

Smaller institutional investors that do not have the resources to do their own internal credit rating assessment, and - we have made this point a number of times - investors in the Middle East and Far East are particularly reliant on the outputs of the ratings agencies. Following the restoration of our investment grade rating by Moody's, we have seen some clear evidence of new buying from those geographical areas.