Peter Mathews (Dublin South, Independent) | Oireachtas source

I welcome our guests. I have been given a couple of questions to ask and have a couple of my own.

Mr. Wallace has acknowledged that PwC was appointed by the liquidator to value the entire loan book. How many of the partners, executives or staff members of PwC appointed by KPMG to conduct the valuations were also partners and senior executives responsible for conducting PwC's Project Atlas - Anglo Irish Bank Corporation plc? This report in the middle of September 2008 found that significant security was in place to minimise the bank's loss through default. Anglo Irish Bank management, subsequently relying on this report, told the Government that just €300 million in additional capital was required for the bank. The figure turned out to be €30 billion.

When assessing due diligence of who should be appointed for the valuation and loan sale preparation process, did the liquidator take account of past experience in the assessment? Does the liquidator agree that, objectively, it is hugely astonishing that the same people who undertook such an appallingly bad original valuation of Anglo Irish Bank in 2008 were hired again and, presumably, paid millions of euro for the privilege?

For how many years was KPMG auditor for Irish Nationwide Building Society, an entity which was subsumed by IBRC and for which KPMG is now the Government appointed liquidator? There is the question which arose in the American courts recently that there was embedded fraudulently charged interest on some of the commercial loans in the Anglo Irish Bank loan book for a long number of years. This has been shown as fact. It was not a once-off case but an experience that was systemic. It implies that any rolled up interest, the subject of such fraudulent charges, contaminates the cumulative loans that are the subject of a sale and that the buyers of such loans are buying loans with toxic or embedded fraudulent charges. How has the liquidator dealt with this issue?

People who took out mortgages, whether in the Irish Nationwide Building Society or, to a smaller degree, in what was Anglo Irish Bank, entered into a series of covenants under headings which included the term of the mortgage loan, the amount of the loan, the repayments, the interest charges and their basis. Even though there may have been some small print licence to sell on or securitise these loans, their essence is a relationship extending over 25 years. I agree with Senator Fidelma Healy Eames that when a loan is sold, even if it is performing-----