Pearse Doherty (Donegal South West, Sinn Fein) | Oireachtas source

Well, I was just going to go on to that issue in terms of security and the perfection of security. And Deputy Murphy rightly outlined the €477 million, I think it was, from NAMA, but NAMA confirmed that that for the institution - the individual banks - was in the region of €2 billion. That's how much loans that could not be perfected because of ... or could not ... had to be written off as a result of unperfected security, and the majority of them rested with your bank. We see on the core documents, Vol. 2, page 63 ... we see an example of 12 files that was carried out. And of ten of those files, no letter from the bank's solicitors confirming the security was complete is evident, that's, 83%. These are loans above €6 million. It talks about the credit policy where draw-down shouldn't happen unless it's authorised in writing by a manager before the perfection of security, but we see that the draw-downs were taking place. And I think in the situation the number of draw-downs up to the time of the review for the 12 selected loans was 67. So, again, we are seeing, like, loans of €149 million which were drawn down with no solicitor's letter on file. So, as a result of your credit policy, that would have had to be authorised by a manager. So, it's not solely the responsibility of the solicitors.