Mr. Alan Dukes:

Yes, well, I have to say that the prevailing culture didn't prevail for very long because very shortly after I was appointed, the chairman or the chief executive resigned and shortly after that, the bank was nationalised.

All of the previous board resigned with the exception of one who became the executive chairman. He'd been on the board for only a short time before that.

Looking back over the picture as it was then, a few things struck me very, very forcibly in addition to what Mike Aynsley has said. Anglo developed a reputation. I knew Anglo when it was a very young bank. I had some dealings with them and it was a business bank and it struck me as being a very progressive and active outfit doing business lending. It went into property then, as you know, in a large way. It was successful and grew rapidly in the property sector in Ireland and looking at it from the outside, it seemed to me they had decided to diversify so they went and got into the property sector in the UK and grew very rapidly. Then they decided again to diversify and they went and did the same thing in the United States. So here we had a bank that was rapidly becoming a monoline with the same kind of risk in three jurisdictions. Now I know they had some other operations in Austria and in Germany but they weren't hugely material in terms of the total.

So there was a very great concentration of risk there. It developed, and they were very proud of it, I think, this kind of system of what they called relationship banking, which was that, and this was part of their picture, they knew their clients very well, they could rely on a relationship with their clients and they knew their clients well enough to know when they could be confident that this was a good loan or this other one wasn't, which resulted in a situation where, as was explained this afternoon at one point, 6% of the loan book constituted loans for land in Ireland on which there was no zoning. Now that to me indicated much more than a prudent appetite for risk and it indicated a failure to appreciate the dangers of the kind of concentration that they had. That was a concentration by sector and then when after ... immediately after nationalisation, we began to look through the loan book and tried to figure out what relationship banking was all about, it became apparent very quickly, and I have dealt with this in my statement, that it took quite a lot of time to find out just where the exposures were or what the level of exposure was to given borrowers. You would find a case where a given borrower ... there was a large exposure to the person in a particular project and then you'd find if you followed the threads through, there were other exposures to the same borrower and in fact-----