Mary Lou McDonald (Dublin Central, Sinn Fein) | Oireachtas source

Let me come at this in a different way. I ask Mr. Long to pull up paragraph 4.17 of the report on his screen. In regard to the arrangement between Lazard and NAMA and the confidentiality which Mr. Long has referenced several times, it states that potential bidders were to be prohibited from contacting the debtors. In other words, there was to be a Chinese wall in terms of debtor information. We now know, and Mr. Long knows, that that condition was breached and compromised and was untenable from the get-go because Frank Cushnahan had an advisory relationship with those debtors accounting for 50% of the portfolio and because Frank Cushnahan, Brown Rudnick and Tughans had, it seems, contrived this approach around debtors and had themselves made the approach to PIMCO. That debtor information that was put together - the witness from Cerberus was quite helpful in setting out that it was abstract in terms of each of the loans, business plans and so on - was in the form of a portfolio of information. When PIMCO exits Brown Rudnick then bequeaths that to Cerberus, which was the successful bidder. As the loan adviser and an organisation which we established earlier stakes its reputation on insight, judgment, transparency and other corporate virtues Lazard failed in that regard. If I were sitting in Mr. Long's seat I would not be quite as gentle as him in respect of NAMA but maybe that is just a temperamental difference. Whatever the misdemeanours of others Lazard failed in respect of those criterion.