Mr. Paul Maloney:

First, the cap was for a liability relating to a €26 million recourse loan and two years of interest. We paid a €29 million recourse guarantee and we said we would pay two years interest and we stopped paying after two years interest. The way it is presented in the Comptroller and Auditor General's report, with which I disagree, it looks like the cap was on the investment the authority was making. The investment was in two tranches: first, its liability for the loan, which was €26 million plus interest and, second, the €32 million in equity it put into the company. That is clear in the shareholders agreement but the way it is worded and has been reported by some members of the press is that we had capped everything at €35 million. I know that the Comptroller and Auditor General in other parts of the report has clarified that but that is why I opened with those two sentences in my statement.

However, the Comptroller and Auditor General is absolutely right that we set two years of paying interest because paragraph 3.4 of the shareholders agreement says that planning would take two years. There was a limit placed on planning for two years because for every development if one buys, as in this case, an unplanned or unzoned site, one has a period after which one gets planning when the equity and value of the site changes and one creates value. The intention, which is in the shareholders agreement, is that this value would be created after two years. One then had two means of getting equity and paying interest.