Dr. Michael Somers:

Well, I mean, you ... you're talking about the money we had ... the cash we had for the Exchequer? No, the only thing we could invest in were banks. And we had guidelines every year ... directions, guidelines from the Minister for Finance which laid down, "Look you're not to invest in banks with a lower credit rating than AA", and such like.

Apart from that we had, kind of, general discretion and we had about 100 banks in our sights. And we would have evaluated about 100 of them and we'd look around to see what one would give us the best rate of interest.