Mr. Kevin Cardiff:

I don't think we tracked them directly, no, but we did spend a great deal of effort in the NAMA legislation to make sure that it would be proof against that kind of thing. If you look at the NAMA legislation, for example, there are even lobbying offences, I think unheard of before in Ireland, where a person other than an agent of a borrower may not lobby on their behalf. I think that even if ... and if they do, NAMA is legally obliged to report the matter to the guards, or it is committing an offence. There's all sorts of provisions and so forth in there about confidentiality, about ensuring that the State's position is protected. There are even provisions in there about ... we had a concern about ransom strips, in other words that if a borrower had control of both a building and a piece of land outside the building, that he wouldn't be able to manipulate the control of the piece of land outside the building to the, to manipulate also the value of the underlying asset.

There were planning provisions and so forth to make sure we could ... that NAMA could get access, could complete its business. So, there was a huge effort in the NAMA legislation to try to anticipate what kind of tactics could a reluctant borrower engage in and to address each one of those as much as we could in legislation. So, a very big effort there and then in relation to the institutions themselves, well, I mean Anglo had been nationalised, new board, new management and they were expected to manage in the best interests of the bank, not in the best interests of any borrower. And in 2010 then ... beginning of 2010, the NTMA was given a ... had a form of roll up to them but it was given the job of being the Minister's ... acting for the Minister in negotiations with the various institutions and to ensure that there was a professionalisation, let's say, of the relationship management with the institutions and at that stage then, new chief executive in NTMA and so forth, they were able to bring in a new approach, a new set of staffing to deal with that. So there was a pretty intensive effort to make sure that ... that things were being looked after more or less right but it still, and still I imagine even now, relies hugely on the managements of individual institutions to ... to do their job. NAMA was a bit different. NAMA, sort of, progressed from a point of not really trusting because we were taking all these loans on to the State's balance sheet. So, there's a lot of anticipated cynicism in the NAMA legislation that probably doesn't ... didn't exist in Irish law before.