Mr. John Moran:

I am happy to comment on that issue. First, letters have been received in the Department on this issue and allegations have been made which, again, are uncorroborated.

We have written to some of those people reminding them that the accusations they are making are possibly defamatory in respect of officials in the Department and myself. It is probably worth noting that, despite suggestions to the contrary, I have never met the Barclay brothers and I have never spoken to Mr. Faber. All I received was one e-mail which I passed on to officials in the Department, which then described this, correctly, as a commercial matter largely to be dealt with by the bank.

The Department's role in respect of issues such as IBRC is fundamentally to do with one point, which is similar to the role that NAMA has described, and that is to protect the taxpayer. That means that we must ensure the taxpayer is getting the best value for the assets being disposed of. In 2011 and 2012, the committee will recall that at the time it was very difficult to secure any interest for assets that were held and being disposed of by the Irish banks. Each time we or the bank sells an asset at a price that is less than 100% of the value of the loan, the taxpayer pays the difference.

The e-mails that cannot be released at present could, when released - to give the committee a flavour of those, and I am being very careful here because I do not wish to say anything that is inappropriate - at least give rise to a substantiation of a series of facts that would require the Department to make sure that at the highest levels in the institution in question it was clear there were competing bids for some of the assets that the institution was managing at the time and a sense that, perhaps, not all of the options were being considered. The responsibility of my officials was to make it clear to the board of the bank, in which we had full confidence, that it should look at all options available for those assets. It is also true that other offers were made from various other parties to us, and in many cases we also verified that the institutions in question were aware of those offers and were taking them into full consideration. The only objective we have in this process is to ensure that when the assets are being sold the best value for the taxpayers is secured in all situations.