Mr. Seamus McCarthy:

I think the Deputy may not have been in the room when I explained to the committee the experience of the members of the team. We carry out the audit of the financial statements every year and then we had three special reports, on each of which Mr. Riordan was the leader of the project. I want to make the point that auditors audit the information that is available in the organisation. In a situation where NAMA did not get property valuations of the assets in relation to the sale of Project Eagle - and this is the fact - then there are not valuations for us to audit. I cannot, and it would be unreasonable and impossible for us to decide a year or 18 months later to, go back and commission valuers to value all the property to rectify what was not done by the organisation itself.

With regard to the focus of Chapter 3 of the report, it is not necessarily or exclusively an accounting issue, it is an economic analysis and evaluation issue. I am satisfied we have the expertise and experience from our work over many years in other areas including public private partnerships, investment in capital projects etc., that we have used the same techniques that NAMA uses for its cashflow projections. It is a relatively standard methodology. With regard to the sales process we were doing a compliance test. NAMA itself has set out a structure for how these sales processes are to be operated. We were looking at how many of the elements were present and how many were missing. One does not have to have considerable market expertise to know that a valuation was not received or that advice around the strategy that should be adopted was received. I am not trying to make judgments about the strategy that NAMA adopted with regard to the way it shaped the portfolio and so on. That is not a judgment call that I am making here. If there was something contentious, if there was advice even to be analysed, then it would have been appropriate perhaps to hire other experts to give another point of view. But that was not there. It is standard procedure for a loan sale adviser to give advice on the structure of the portfolio and what way to present the assets to the market. When one compares Project Eagle, there was no such advice from the loan sale adviser so there is not anything for me to audit there either. With regard to auditing the process and if things that happened in a sale competition either did or did not happen, it is not that technical.