Mr. Brendan Rogers:

The complex report will be ready within a few days. A team is working on the report independently. It will be presented to the Tánaiste and I presume it will be available publicly within six days.

The team will carry out a forensic examination of our systems, which are obviously are not perfect. We must put our hands up. Money has disappeared so there is room for improvement. We must embrace the recommendations. We will do that.

On the question of expenditure profiles, we carry out very detailed expenditure profiles on the money that leaves the system to go to the NGOs, government or other international organisations. Northern Uganda is remote, and Karamoja is one of the 55 districts which are inhospitable remote places. They are only coming back to life. There are very detailed district plans which have been budgeted for and the additional funds from the PRDP programme are measured. The money was coming down and was being measured. Clearly, Ugandan Government money was coming down into the system. The gap in the donor funds had not been reached yet. I examined some of these profiles in the past couple of months and what was quite clear was that the amounts of money going into the districts had dipped. It was way below what it should have been, which now would be a red flag matter. We would then work back into the system again.

The Ugandan financial system has been evaluated as being reasonably robust by the World Bank, the IMF and FID. The British carried out a fiduciary risk assessment and we use these assessments all the time because they are highly technical and have been done by experts. Our view is that on balance the risk is reasonable. What happened with these funds is that they did not go into the system. They went into a holding account, because we wanted to mingle them with the other donor funds and collusion at a very high level was required to go into the system and extract those funds before they went into the Treasury. To see collusion at that level is a matter of grave concern. That is the reason we had to take the serious decision we did.

We have been working very hard and Mr. Michael Gaffey has taken the lead on this in the past couple of years to work with NGOs to improve their results focus and accountability. They have made real improvements. We work in very difficult and risky environments. All of us, NGOs, international organisations and Department officials must try to mitigate that risk to the extent possible. Clearly we did not put enough focus on the risk at the very highest level. Neither did the other donors, Sweden, Norway and Denmark.

We work very closely with other donors. There are a number of donor groups in Kampala, meeting all of the time and exchanging information. I can say hand on heart that this took those other donors completely by surprise.