Mr. Alan Dukes:

Could I just add one or two brief comments to that, if I may? Whether that was a rogue view of an individual in the Department, one can't be sure. I have to say, I frequently had the impression that information that we transmitted to the Department didn't percolate all the way through. You know, it maybe didn't percolate all the way through to where it should. And a second comment about a sales processes: we were very concerned at all points to ensure we got maximum value, which is how we designed the processes but there was, from time to time, a suggestion that we should do it differently. For example, I was urged at one point by an official to speed up sales of various performing assets, whereas, as I say in my statement, we tended to take the view that if there was a loan that was performing, meeting all of its requirements and covenants and it was going to mature within the wind-down period of the bank, there wasn't a good reason to go and try to terminate that early, although this was what was being urged.

And when I asked the person in question why on earth we'd want to do that ... because if we had a performing loan and the borrower was meeting all the covenants the only way we could persuade the borrower to pay off the loan early would be to put some incentive on the table, which meant we would be getting less out of it than we otherwise would. But, you know, there was a view, sometimes expressed by some people in the Department, that if there was a good loan there, we should take the money and run, you know, force a refinancing or a sale on the basis that, you know, there was a time value of money and that a bird in the hand is worth two in the bush, whereas we took a different view that we had to look at recoveries over the whole period and, in addition, if you had a performing loan that was paying, it was making a contribution on a continuing basis to the running costs of the bank.