Professor Patrick Honohan:

The way in which the calculations were done was heavily negotiated with DG Comp, the European Commission. They were very alert to the danger that banks would be given a gift by excessively generous pricing, and so that was heavily negotiated. How that would be done - there's a kind of art of property valuation which ... all sorts of rules of thumb which property people seem to believe in. Of course, it depended on where the properties were, what were the collaterals, were the personal guarantees any good, all of that had to be put into the calculation, the likely dividends, or the likely interest payments, so I didn't attempt to second guess all those calculations, but I was insistent against any suggestion that this overall 30% figure that was floated in September of 2009 would become a de facto target. I said they must go through the calculations and come out with an honest and straightforward figure. Of course, it was a big number then, because they'd very short notice that it was going to move up into the higher ranges in March. It was really oh, oh, so ... and then, was it going to get worse? We didn't know.