Mr. Frank Daly:

I will explain to the Deputy and Mr. Brendan McDonagh may wish to come in. The answer is in our statements. It is because of events that occurred in the past week in particular. There was the media commentary and then people were saying to us there was a dossier about NAMA in the media, which had been given to some Members of the Oireachtas and some members of the public and that it contained all sorts of allegations. Principally, it comes down to two sets of allegations, one of which was the valuations issue. That was a very serious issue so far as we were concerned because it was designed to undermine totally the credibility of the organisation. As we have gone into the valuation of the loans in detail earlier today I will not repeat it. Any suggestion left unchallenged and unchecked that NAMA had manipulated the valuations would have been a very serious issue for everybody in the organisation, for the board, for me as chairman and for Mr. Brendan McDonagh as CEO. That was one issue we wanted to get the opportunity to speak about. We did not want to just issue a statement and we did not want to hold a press conference. We thought the Committee of Public Accounts was the appropriate forum in which to address the issue. We also wanted to address the issue of the so-called leaking of information of which, when one strips away much of the verbiage and repetition, there have been only two instances in our four-year history in which we have reported individuals to the Garda for a breach of that legislation. That is under active investigation.

I will make the point I made earlier. We seem to be one of the few groups in Dublin that has not had seen this dossier or whatever it is. There are other allegations in it, all of which seem to stem from Mr. Farrell, an individual whom NAMA reported to the Garda and who is being investigated for a criminal offence. We did think it extraordinary that nobody was questioning the source of all of that misinformation. We owed it to the taxpayers. We had a discussion earlier during which it was stated that the taxpayers own NAMA. We work for the taxpayer. We had a discussion at the board yesterday and we felt that taxpayers need to understand and to have confidence in the organisation. They may not agree with every decision we make but they need to have confidence in the integrity and the propriety within the organisation. We owed it to our staff, the 300 people working in NAMA.

Again, I refer to the point I made in my opening statement. By definition we are collecting money on behalf of the taxpayers and in doing that we are taking it from debtors. Understandably, there are many people out there who do not like us. The job that our staff do every day is very difficult. It is stressful.

It is confrontational in many cases. As a board, chief executive and chairman, we owed it the staff because we believe in their integrity and work ethic to come before the committee and publicly confront these allegations. While they are in some cases unknown to us, we know they have been made. The principal allegation, on valuation, goes to the heart of NAMA's structure, propriety and professionalism. We wanted to nail it and I hope we have done so.