Mr. Seamus McCarthy:

The note Mr. Crawley provided deals with what was in the shareholders' agreement. The "back and forth" between Mr. Maloney and me was regarding what the board authorised, directed or decided should be in the shareholders' agreement and regarding the investment. I have no difficulty with what is in Mr. Crawley's note. Those are the facts and I am satisfied with that. The difficulty arises around what the board thought it was doing or agreeing to at the time. In practice we were restricted to relying on the board minutes which Mr. Maloney and I agreed should be a comprehensive record of what was decided.

I have tried to outline this morning that this was the sequence of decisions, and the Chair has referred to the speed at which the decisions appeared to be changing. I was also trying to draw attention to the lack of clarity about what those decisions were, even in respect of this limit of €35 million. It appears, when we look at the executive board minutes, that what they were talking about was a limit on the exposure through the guarantee. In fact, the limit of €35 million was on everything else except the guarantee. The guarantee had a separate scope of limitation. Effectively, the guarantee was 26% of €100 million, or €26 million, plus 26% of the interest on the Becbay borrowing for a period of two years. In the event, that is not the way it panned out, and by the time the authority came to do the deal with NAMA at the end of 2010, it had racked up a total exposure of about €82 million. Further liability would have accrued up to July 2011. Had a deal not been done with NAMA, that liability would have continued to increase.

There are two points involved. The first is that the attempt to limit the exposure did not work, and the second is the fact that the amount that they were agreeing to commit was changing within the space of days. That is something that should be very clearly documented in minutes and very clearly understood by boards when they make decisions like these.