Mr. Matthew Elderfield:

Many parties - ourselves and others - missed a key problem on the client assets. That was a very frustrating experience. There was this history from 2007. I first heard about it in the spring of 2010 and I approached it in two ways. The aim was to make sure the client assets were okay. From memory, we did a review, we had a third-party review, and we had two external auditor reviews - something of that order. All of them said there were some questions about systems and controls but the client assets were fine. The question was, if the client assets were fine, did we want to close the company down or liquidate it, or did we want to try to get the management out? If we had liquidated it then, we would have crystallised a loss for the investors because of all of the illiquid property investments.