Dr. Cyril Roux:

It is a right of companies to make losses if they have the wherewithal to do that. It is not that we do not see the figures or companies making losses. We monitor solvency and when it is threatened or we see a trend that cannot continue, we act upon it. We cannot prevent shareholders from deciding they will stay in the market. What happened in the Irish market, until the failure of Setanta, was that at least one actor was always willing to underprice. At that stage the commercial decision by other actors was either to price themselves out of the market - suffering losses for another reason because of their cost or expense base as there is not sufficient business to absorb it - or to make the opposite decision to stay in the market and ask for less than break-even prices. We let this play out, because that is the insurance cycle, until there is a risk for the solvency of firms. When there is a risk for the solvency of the firms, we act and we have done so.