Professor Patrick Honohan:

I would not deny that its business model was developed over a number of years. One must be very careful about the DEPFA-Hypo thing. I cannot claim to be an expert on it but it seems clear that it was not just the fact that DEPFA ran out of cash. It was the fact that DEPFA was married to Hypo which had serious loan loss issues. The fatal problem was that DEPFA had no cash because the market for short-term corporate bonds had dried up and its parent was heading towards balance sheet insolvency. Therefore, it was the marriage of those two things. DEPFA's portfolio was reasonably good. As far as I can make out, and if one tracks it back, DEPFA probably was not balance sheet insolvent and liquidity would have brought it over the line. This is something that we do not have full information about.