Mr. John Moran:

How we have been analysing the process - this is being done by Mr. Carville's team and some others - is we have been trying to check a measure of the expected outcome of the Anglo business plan, so to speak, at the beginning of the year against the cost of the liquidation. One of the difficulties here is that when one asks the liquidator to undertake the job of effectively managing the bank down to zero, one must do an analysis - I am reluctant to give any sense of the position, although I am happy to send the Deputy the analysis - and compare the total cost of effort required to do the job being done against what the bank would have done. The bank would have had a certain number of staff at the outset and nobody would have considered this expense to be external fees as these staff were the employees in the bank.

We must trust the liquidator to make these decisions, to the extent that the liquidator, in managing the process, might decide to reduce the number of staff and supplement that by people of his own team. The Deputy should recall that at the outset of this exercise, it was unclear what level of co-operation one would get from the existing teams in banks. Therefore, we had to have a certain element of external and double cover in the earlier weeks. As things stabilised, the liquidator was able to conduct the exercise of winding down the banks, using both his own team and the people in the bank. Therefore, the appropriate measure of analysis would be to compare the expected cost of running the bank during this period against the cost now of running the bank plus the cost of the liquidators' fees. In a sense, whether one pays for somebody who is an employee of the liquidator or of the bank to do treasury activity, it is appropriate to look at both. One analysis we were doing was to continue to monitor the expenditure of the liquidator, in the context of adding that to the cost of running the banks, to ensure we did not get into a situation of excessive expenditure, given the job in hand. At the same time, we recognised a considerably different job needed to be done.

Mr. Carville referred to the fact that as we went into the process, we realised significant volumes of work were involved and that the process would take longer because of the level of due diligence that needed to be done and because of the repair job that needed to be done on the assets to allow them to be sold, in the context of legal and other work. Therefore, we re-engaged with the liquidators and the legal firms and despite the lack of a legal right to do so or to require them to exercise a reconsideration of their fees, they have reduced them. We will get the figures on that for the Deputy, but we need to do the analysis to get the total picture on that.