Mr. Frank Daly:

I welcome the opportunity to respond to the Comptroller and Auditor General special report into the sale of Project Eagle. I welcome it in particular because of the hugely damaging leaking of the Comptroller and Auditor General report, which I stress was not by the Comptroller and Auditor General, in the weekend before publication which was accompanied by briefings suggesting there were irregularities mentioned in the report. Over the weekend those irregularities became inflated to major irregularities. This was highly damaging to NAMA and I can only presume it was intended to be. There are no irregularities suggested in this report. I want to put that on record. I thank the Chairman for facilitating us this morning so we could watch the proceedings during the morning. By and large, perhaps with some exceptions, it was a very open, constructive and fair process and I trust we can look forward to the same.

I make two general observations from this morning because it seems to me that when one looks and listens through the whole thing there are lots of figures bandied about. There are an awful lot of figures in the report. It really boils down to three. The first is the £1.674 billion, which was the adjusted carrying value at the end of 2013. There is no disagreement between us and the Comptroller and Auditor General on that figure. Then there is the discount rate and the consequence of applying two different discount rates.

The Comptroller and Auditor General applies 5.5% and comes to €1.49 billion as a net present value. We apply 10% and we come to €1.3 billion.