Professor Brian Norton:

As I said in the opening statement, two aspects need to be clarified. The impression was given that the loss from SWETS UK was of two amounts. The bankruptcy loss was €718,000 but the service that was subsequently procured was a budget amount that applied to that. There was only one sum of money lost yet the impression was given that there were two. Additionally, the impression was given that the review by Ernst & Young had identified sums of money that were not properly approved through our processes and that somehow, some money had gone amiss. The approval process in its transaction had not been appropriate and we amended that subsequently. However, those monies were budgeted for, approved and procured.

The other observation I would make is that the Ernst & Young report itself had been provided to the Comptroller and Auditor General and the HEA and fully discussed with the latter. This was alluded to in the covering report we supplied to the Committee of Public Accounts. It is to the regret of our governing body and my own personal regret that we did not provide it here. We did not do so because the issues and what we have done about them were covered in the management report we provided. Again, there is a suggestion that in not providing the Ernst & Young report we were not giving the full information to the committee or that we were misleading the committee. I can assure the members that this was not the case.