Mr. Alan Dukes:

There was the other point which had to do with the rate of procedure to the wind-down. This is maybe trespassing on some other question. It was decided in 2011 that we should wind down the bank over ten years - maximum recovery for the State and maximum avoidance of risk, if you like. The actual outline proposal for the pace of the wind-down was one which the bank proposed. I proposed it at a meeting with the relevant authorities and it was accepted. I made the point, at that stage, that we could probably do a more rapid wind-down with not a very much bigger risk of execution and I was told, at that point, "No, do not propose that." And I assumed, and I think I was probably right in assuming this, that the authorities did not want to be corralled into a wind-down process that might be faster than we could actually deliver so we agreed on an outline wind-down proposal, what we called, in our own internal jargon, "the blue bars", which were the declining outstanding loan values in each year. But, from time to time, we would be urged to accelerate the process. Now we did actually wind down a bit faster than "the blue bars" proposal because we found we could do it without sacrificing the level of return and, in fact, the US book was a very good example of that. We certainly thought that had we done a series of individual sales of those assets, we would have made a better return out of it, but it would have taken much longer than the process that we actually engaged in and we were concerned, for other reasons, for other considerations, to wind down the American operation, you know, as quickly as we could and to get rid of all the outlying parts of the bank so that we could concentrate on the core.

But, you know, from time to time there would be pressure to say, "Well, can you not do it a bit faster?" and we said, "Yes, of course, we could do it faster but if you want us to do it faster than we have undertaken to do in the exercise, then please give us a formal instruction to do that", and that was never forthcoming.