Mr. Jonathan Sugarman:

On the point of the letter of the law, I would like to highlight something which I think is crucially significant. As can be seen, these regulations were issued in 2006. This is item No. 6 of what I provided to the committee. I ask committee members to turn to section 9.4, in which it says that it relates to the implementation of these new regulations. Although the letter of regulation was issued in June 2006, if members look at the last paragraph at the bottom of page 23, it says that the revised liquidity report will be prepared in parallel with the existing requirements for a six-month period commencing January 2007. If members look at the last sentence in that paragraph, it is that limits on the level of maturity mismatch - that is bank-talk for liquidity - will take effect on the completion of the six-month parallel run in 2007. That is to say that both calculations are done in the six-month parallel run. From 1 July 2007, these new regulations and methods were the only ones that applied. It is significant that three years later, we saw that the regulator, still called the Financial Regulator, re-issued the same requirements. It says "Requirements for the Management of Liquidity Risk". This time, it was issued in June 2009.

I ask the Chairman to turn to section 9. It is entitled "Reporting". One can see, if the two sections from these regulations - which were three years apart - are compared, that section 9 is on reporting, reporting obligations etc. Section 9.1 is "Licensed Credit Institutions", section 9.2 is "Banking Groups", section 9.3 is "Branches of EEA and non-EEA Banks". I dare the Chairman to find section 9.4, on implementation. There is no reference in the 2009 legislation to this being law in Ireland in 2007. Reference will be found, in the preamble, to banking Acts going all the way back to 1942, 1971, 1989 and 2001. Nowhere in this document will one find a reference to the year 2007. The simple reason for that is that none of this was upheld. There is only one silly man, Jonathan Sugarman, who took this law seriously.

A year after he resigned, we had a pile up on the M1 called the overnight guarantee so we better reissue the law and pretend it never existed.