Mr. Frank Daly:

But sure were we not through it this morning? When I was here in July I told the committee that I had briefed the Northern Ireland committee in October 2013 that there had been an expression of interest from PIMCO. That was all. So that was the first indication we had. After a period of a couple years of almost stagnation where there was very little interest in the Northern Ireland assets or very little interest, by the way, in somebody from Northern Ireland coming to us and proposing that we might invest or do this, that and the other.

Then one gets an indication that there is. Here is a very credible international investment fund that is interested. Of course we looked at it and we assessed it, and decided - against the wishes of PIMCO by the way - that we would go for an open-market transparent process, and that is what we did. Initially we decided, I think, at a board meeting in October that we would pursue the thing with PIMCO and see how seriously they are interested - is this a try-on? Then when we determined that they were, we decided to go with an open-market process. In the December 2013 board meeting we decided to go with the open-marketed process. In January we appointed Lazard as the loan sales broker, which is what we would do. It is quite normal in a lot of large portfolio sales. That was the process.

We did, obviously, look at whether there were other options. What would the other options be? Sell it in smaller lots; sell each asset; wait in Northern Ireland until 2020 or whatever. What was the opportunity cost of that? I mentioned that to Deputy Costello. The opportunity cost is we were going to be tied up in those individual assets - not great assets in an economy that was, at the time, pretty stagnant - there was no great interest in them - with greater opportunities elsewhere for NAMA to manage its assets and invest in its assets; opportunities here and opportunities in London. All of that was taken into account in the decision to pursue a single sale with a reserve price, which was the one we calculated was the minimum value we would take for this and which was reached in the end.