Dr. Michael Somers:

This arose out of the need to reduce substantially the number of staff in the bank and to provide both for early retirement provisions and for redundancy, or for whatever term one wants to put on a reduction in the number of employees.

The trustees of the pension fund required that additional funds be put into the pension fund by the bank to meet the additional pension liabilities that would accrue as a result of the early retirement arrangements. The amount of funding required was fixed at €1.1 billion. The Department of Finance did not want the bank to put any cash into the fund. As such, it put in loans which hopefully will generate funds over time. The proposal came to the board in the context of the restructuring and downsizing of the bank and the board approved the arrangement. I should point out that the bank had no option but to approve it.