David Cullinane (Waterford, Sinn Fein) | Oireachtas source

I welcome our witnesses and a welcome back to Mr. McEnery. I believe he was here a few weeks ago also. I found the opening statement by Mr. Soffe to be quite defensive. The board of NAMA has a right to defend itself but I found the statement itself to be quite defensive and emotional in some ways. Emotional statements were made rather than statements of fact, but we will return to that shortly. It is only my opinion and the witness is entitled to defend himself.

I will now turn to the issue of conflict of interest. Mr Rowntree was before the committee last week and he spoke about the process around conflict of interest. Mr. Soffe has spoken about the way that conflict of interest was dealt with; if a member of the board of NAMA or the NIAC believed there was a conflict of interest in any present or past experiences they would have had with companies, these would have to be declared, there is an annual declaration and then at every meeting people had to fill in a form. Is the process the same for the NAMA board itself?