Mr. Brendan O'Connor:

I do not have the actual figure for personal guarantees. I am not sure we have ever measured the figure of how many personal guarantees we have but there would be a substantial amount of them. Off the top of my head, I would say it is probably half of our customers.

To the extent there is a personal guarantee, we would consider the totality of the debt as I mentioned across all of the asset classes. It comes into play when we are compromising on debt. We will also seek the introduction of something by the sponsor into that. The only reason we are around is because we are in receipt of €20 billion from the taxpayer. The idea I could compromise on debt where people have borrowed in their own name for an SME and leave behind value that could have been introduced by the business owner is not tenable. We do not consider personal guarantees as something distinct or separate. We look at it in the totality of trying to come to an arrangement across all of the asset classes while protecting the SME and employment. Those are the two priorities we put into our business.

There are no fees to be in the financial services group. It would strike me as counterintuitive to increase fees on someone already in difficulty, given that in many cases we will not recover all of the debt in question. All I would actually be doing is making my loss greater. In fact, we often have to forbear on fees and charges for customers that fall under the remit of the financial services group because it does not make sense in the long run.

I cannot disclose the fees we pay to receivers of buy-to-let properties. I deal with four different buy-to-let platforms but the clue is in the name, the low-cost fixed-asset receiver platform. As an overall percentage of the asset, it is quite small and we would have tendered out on it.