Mr. Matthew Elderfield:

Let us suppose a bank has on its books a stream of revenue of 100 units and the value of the property is 100 units. Then the bank cannot count the stream of revenue and for the value of the property the bank must figure out what the real disposal costs will be and what the house price will be, because they may not amount to 100. To dispose of a house there are administrative costs and so on. That is quite a significant incentive for the banks to get through it as well as the capital measure.

When I launched the targets with the Minister for Finance he said in quite a pointed way that he expects the management of the State-owned banks to get on top of the targets before it gets to that and that, basically, their jobs were on the line.