Mr. Dargan Fitzgerald:

And I feel that the accounting profession and then, by extension, the auditing profession, was rightly very careful to interpret appropriately the precise wordings within international accounting standard 39 and the relevant guidance notes and ... and I think it touches on some of the points in your question. It is ... it is absolutely the case, in my professional opinion, that there ... there was not very great latitude in terms of recognition of loan losses and when I say not great latitude, I mean that ... that tests of the existence of objective evidence of impairment of the loans had to be passed before impairments could be made. And my ... my clear understanding from the work of ... of our own audit teams in this case is that we very carefully assessed whether ... whether management had appropriately implemented those specific definitional requirements of objective evidence of impairment. And where judgments were made, that for example, additional provisions were required, that those were justified in all the circumstances. There were some elements of a judgment, particularly in larger loans, and particularly in cases where there was perhaps some repayment capacity but repayments had perhaps slowed and perhaps where collateral values had declined but were still substantial. And all of those things had to be taken into ... in the round in making an individual assessment of impairment.