Mr. Brendan McDonagh:

The Comptroller and Auditor General has benchmarked us against future sales where we were doing all that stuff. As one of my colleagues explained previously, the loan sales market changed from late 2014 onwards when bidders demanded up-to-date valuations of all the underlying collateral. As I said in my opening statement, until late 2013 we envisaged that the sale of the Project Eagle portfolio would be a hard slog all the way to 2020. An opportunity came along involving one of the most credible counterparties in the world, PIMCO, which had approximately €200 billion of assets under management. We said we would provide an opportunity to prove the concept of whether a firm like PIMCO would be interested in the portfolio.