Joe Higgins (Dublin West, Socialist Party) | Oireachtas source

Okay. Mr. Fingleton, the chief executive of NAMA, Mr. McDonagh, said as a comment on the covered banks generally, including Irish Nationwide, "the banks consider[ed] property lending to be almost a one-way bet, notwithstanding the well-established cyclical behaviour of property markets". And the chairman of NAMA, Mr. Daly, on the same lines, said, "the banks were taking the type of risk normally the preserve of private equity ... hedge fund providers without demanding the same level of rigorous analysis". And if I can put to you then the ... in some detail what the Nyberg report, which I am sure you have read in detail, and I quote in relation to INBS, "Loan contracts tended to include profit share agreements, with INBS receiving ... between 25% and 50% of the profit when [the] project was concluded successfully." Nyberg continues:

This business model was, in principle and in practice, risky because of the planning permission risks involved and because of the reliance on the refinancing of borrowers by other banks. These risks were seen by INBS as significantly mitigated by accepting, as borrowers, only developers who had a long and successful history of doing such projects.

And my quote concludes: "The model was in some ways closer to that of a venture capital financier than that of typical banks."

Now if you take those three observations, Mr. Fingleton, essentially amounting to a claim that INBS was more a venture capitalist organisation than a building society, and then if we add further observations about only 30 individuals or entities being responsible for 41% of your total loan book, and these individuals, as you said yourself, had a long relationship with, with you and the society ... I mean, would it be fair to say that it wasn't just a venture capitalist project but a crony capitalist one as well in the methods which you used?