Mr. Alan Dukes:

Chairman, without wishing to stray outside of the remit of the committee I will say by way of general introduction that guessing what might have happened if the bank had not been liquidated seems to me to be the kind of second guessing post factumof decisions which is rather dangerous, but I won't go any further with that thought because I think you can probably understand why. There's another commission of investigation coming down the tracks.

The decision to liquidate in February 2013 was motivated, and this is on the record of the Dáil, by a concern with dealing with the cost of the promissory note that had supported the bank for some time before that. I described the decision at the time as an astute piece of financial engineering, which I think it was. I feel vindicated in that view by the fact that the current second secretary of the Department of Finance has used the same phrase, I think, in evidence to this committee. I think it was an astute piece of financial engineering and it's part of what I meant in my opening statement when I said that the State seemed to have dealt very well with the macroeconomic fall-out from the decision in the first place.

I think, and there will be other people who can give a different view on this, I think that had the bank not been liquidated, given the market conditions as they changed, you know, through 2013 up to today, I think it's possible to speculate that we might have made an even better return from the remaining assets of the bank if it hadn't been, in the course of being disposed of, in a liquidation but that has to be speculation. Having said that, as far as I can see, the special liquidators are doing an extremely good job. I don't know when they'll have concluded their work but it must be pretty soon.