Mr. Alan Dukes:

I do not believe there are shackles that I would wish were taken from the bank. We have a number of restrictions, the most notable being in terms of the European Commission's commitments letter. We are allowed to lend a very limited amount of money to borrowers if that is a substantial part of rescuing the loan, so to speak, and making it viable. There is a percentage limit per facility that is extended and an overall maximum quantum for the bank. In every case so far we have been well within the limits for the given loan and we are well within the overall limit set for the bank.

I would very much like to have an opportunity of sitting down at some leisure with a regulator. I know my colleagues are a bit nervous of me saying this. It is a waste of time, energy and money for the bank to have to state, for example, on a monthly basis that the Minister for Finance has not required us to do A, B or C, and there is a good bit of that in regulatory reporting. I am not sure that it is really designed to put the focus on where the real problems are. That is a hobbyhorse of mine. I would like to see much more succinctly expressed and much more brutally applied regulation. I have been dealing with regulation one way or another for most of my working career and I find that the more elaborate the rules are, the more opportunity people have to get around them. The simpler the rules and the more brutally they are applied, the more we can be sure of getting the desired result.

I will ask Mr. Woodhouse to respond to the question as to who is buying.