Dr. Michael Somers:

We ... in looking at Anglo, we felt that it didn't have any future. We had been sceptical about it for quite a long time. We felt that it grew very rapidly, it seemed to make very good profits, it seemed to pay over the odds for cash, it seemed to charge over the odds when it lent out money. It didn't have a natural deposit base. It was kind of, we felt, an accident waiting to happen. It relied largely on either large deposits or funding on the interbank market. It didn't have a natural small deposit base which at least might be ... you know, fairly secure that you wouldn't find all these deposits disappearing at the one time. But if you rely on the interbank market which is ... it's certainly not made for backing long-term lending ... well, there's going to be trouble. So they had obviously got into trouble. The impression we had was that a lot of their loans were ... well they'd been provided for property, etc., they would have been questionable. Whether it was going to be nationalised then or at a later stage or whatever, I don't know. But my general view would have been that it didn't have a long-term future and that it wasn't something that we could bring back to life again.