Mr. Mike Aynsley:

This is ... this is actually ... I think this is a very important concept because it gets right to the heart of, you know, the difference between the highest sale price and what is the best economic value in a transaction. And, in this particular case with the US book, there were economic value considerations outside the control of the bank and they were really at the State level. So whilst, you know, we're governed by the EC restructuring plan, we're governed by the commitments letter which says that we need to get certain returns on assets when we sell on on a net present value basis, and we have to deal with timeframes for running down a portfolio so ... in other words you just don't want to go and sell a portfolio and fire sale it and say "I've done a good job because I've wound this bank down quickly." The idea is to wind it down no quicker than the timeframe, but to achieve the best result.

In this case there was a major result that the State was looking for apart from the financial return in Anglo Irish Bank, and that was to alleviate this very significant problem with the ECB funding levels. So the deleveraging of the system was something which was a statewide objective that we couldn't make a decision around. The Minister needed to make that decision, ultimately decided that this was an important component, formed part of the decision-making process and resulted in a ministerial instruction for us to sell the portfolio or include some assets in the portfolio that we probably or that we definitely would have kept for a longer period if these other issues were not at the forefront.