Mr. Seamus McCarthy:

In most cases the property valuations it would have had would have been property valuations as of November 2009. Those were included originally in the cashflow projections that it established from the beginning and which, in fact, it used to figure out the price it paid for the loans when it bought them. Subsequently, NAMA's asset managers would have looked at those values. In some cases they might have received new valuations, for example, in 2012 or 2013, so those would have been fed into the cashflows, but in other situations they would have reduced the cashflows to reflect trends in the market. It is market information as opposed to specific valuations for individual properties. That was all fed into the cashflow and those types of adjustments to the cashflows are examined every year by our office in the course of the audit. We were always tracking the work it was doing. In fact, we involved the Valuation Office again at the end of the audit of 2013 to look again at how NAMA was managing that process of adjusting values for properties in the cashflow.

The Deputy, quoting Mr. McDonagh, mentioned treating it as certain future amounts. No amount in the future is certain. Events can change and any projection is always subject to an element of uncertainty. If a cashflow projection is to be useful for decision-making purposes, it should reflect the best estimate there can be at a point in time.