Mr. John Moran:

I will describe syndication so everybody understands exactly how it worked. There was a variety of people. There were private syndicators, private wealth managers, stockbroking firms and the private banking arms of the banks, which effectively pooled together private investors to pool together their equity to allow them to buy larger assets. Those assets would have been out of an individual's reach in terms of their size and scale so the syndicates pooled the equity, put debt in behind it to support those types of transactions and then proceeded to acquire.

They pooled together the equity, put debt in behind it to support that type of transactions and then proceeded to acquire. Coincidentally, that started in the financial services centre in the mid-1990s, where a lot of syndicated deals were put together to benefit from what were quite attractive tax allowances and then continued into 2000 onwards. We do not involve ourselves in syndicates and never put together any syndicates. Our job, with regard to any private syndicate, was to advise it on trying to find opportunities for it. If the syndicate was successful in buying, it then was to do the due diligence for the syndicate on that transaction.