Dr. Michael Somers:

In terms of would I have acted differently, well, I had in mind, as I mentioned earlier, a model of 30 to 40 people in the NTMA overseeing the process and putting pressure on the banks to sort out the problems rather than our take ... trying to take away these loans from the banks. Because, as I say, I felt that they knew where the bodies were all buried - we didn't. And we needed to put together a team to do this work and we didn't have a readily available team to do it, whereas the banks did have this team. And I felt that they'd created the problem. They knew what the problem was, they knew where the ... as I say, where the bodies were buried. They knew the individuals they were dealing with and I felt that they should sort it out.

In terms of the discount, I mean, there's no absolute value for anything. The price of anything ... the value of something is what somebody's prepared to pay you and if there's no money around, of course, the value of a product, whether its a house or a piece of land or whatever, is going to fall. So, in terms of the NAMA discount, I suppose I would have thought to myself, well ... I knew Brendan but I don't know if I said to anybody, "He's going to cover his back - he's going to impose whatever discount he feels is necessary to make sure that he, at the end of the day, doesn't end up showing a loss." And if I was in his position, I would have done the same thing. Now, whether they had the correct discounts or not, I don't know. I mean, I ended up then on the other side of the field as the State director with AIB and I was looking at this ... these discounts and I said, "God, these are enormous discounts. Are these justified?" And, of course, they were saying, "Well, they're not." And I said, "Well, why don't you challenge them then?" And they said, "Well, we can't challenge them [I think] 'til the whole process is finished." And I think they felt they were not going to win anyway. But that was it. And the problem was the discounts then, of course, impinged on the capital of the banks and we ended up then in a situation where, okay, NAMA was not going to make a loss but, on the other hand, the banks had to be recapitalised by the State, so we put it into one pocket and took it out of another pocket and handed it back to the banks to recapitalise them.