Mr. Kevin Cardiff:

There was a lot of merger options considered and the real problem, Senator, was that no one of them was really sound enough to take the others on. You see, what you hope when you do a merger is if you take, say, a bank that's reasonably well capitalised but is short on funding, and you put it into a bank that has plenty of funding but may need the capital, you have a synergy there that really works, but there didn't seem to be a strong enough case for doing that, especially since you would lose time and effort in the merger arrangements. There was a significant ... I think the most likely merger that didn't happen, if you like, was between ILP and EBS, in part because EBS had access ... EBS had a set-up of what they call a covered bond bank, so it had a mode of funding which ILP did not have, and ILP had a very high loan-to-deposit ratio and this might have helped. But, to be honest, as things went on, it seemed clear that first of all EBS's loan-to-deposit ratio itself wasn't so healthy and it was not big enough to create a big difference for ILP and even covered bonds, in other words secured bonds, were getting hard to issue, so at that stage, I think people just said, "Well, look, there's not much more to pursue here." So it ... it mostly was because there were no marriages of institutions that looked like it would make a stronger couple than they were as individuals.