Mr. Terence O'Rourke:

In terms of, generally speaking, as a practice in my experience as managing partner, occasionally and rarely happened that we did get approaches from companies to say, you know, we're not getting on well with the audits ... a member to the audit team. In those circumstances, where there was any request for a change in audit team, we would take that very seriously because obviously, that's an issue in terms of audit independence. If an audit partner, for example, is causing too much trouble, we need to be very sure that the request for any changes are ... is well-founded and all the rest. So we will take any such requests to a separate group on the firm and any such issues would've been referred to a group, including myself as managing partner, the head of audit and the head of risk. We would've looked to the issues and we would've tried to understand the circumstances that were going on and we would have sought to make sure that the independent position of the firm was unaffected. And that if, you know, we can see life is life and personalities don't get on sometimes and it is a matter if there's somebody, you know, not liking the way somebody sat or looked at you or something like that, then we will accede to requests but if a person was doing the right thing, and the client was not liking the way they were doing the right thing, well then we would do the right thing and we wouldn't change an audit partner for that.

Any such decision would involve us, the client didn't request ... we would appoint any replacement partner, we decided who the right person was to reflect the skills required and the experience ... and the client didn't have any choice as to who they got. We decided who the partner would be in those ... and, as I say, it's very rarely happened over my life as managing partner.