Mr. Ed Sibley:

We take breaches very seriously. I know the Chairman has raised concerns about this instance and that he raised them again in passing on Tuesday. I would like to spend a couple of minutes dealing with this issue.

Since the financial crisis, and certainly since the appointment of Matthew Elderfield as Deputy Governor of the Central Bank, the credible threat of enforcement has been central to our overall supervisory approach and the evidence of that which we referred to earlier is more than 100 successful public enforcement cases and millions of euros worth of fines imposed, including in respect of the entity where Mr. Sugarman worked. I note that my predecessor and his predecessor considered this issue specifically. There have been third-party reviews of the issue and the broader control framework in place. We have also conducted our own investigations on this matter. I am satisfied that the action taken on this case was appropriate and that includes considering the further meeting held by the Chairman of the committee, Mr. Sugarman, the Governor, members of my team and of Ms Rowland's team. The type of business we are talking about in this case is noteworthy. It is a subsidiary of a parent organisation and many of its transactions, its core business, are associated with the parent, as a funding vehicle for the parent company. It certainly was at that period. Typically that involved relatively large transactions. Any comparison with Northern Rock or the domestic banking system here are not well founded. In respect of the specific breach that Mr. Sugarman refers to in August 2007 the liquidity regime in Ireland changed in July 2007. That is a backdrop to the incident but in more general terms, where there are large transactions, the regime in place at the time was focused on matching maturities and liabilities associated with different time bands. Where there are significant and sizeable transactions, however, it is possible and plausible that through placing or completing a transaction overnight potentially under a new regime, human error could result in some breach that would not necessarily indicate a fundamental problem with liquidity or a fundamental breakdown of systems and controls, or a wider systemic issue. The amount of time being spent on this case demonstrates the seriousness with which we take information that is brought to us. It is thoroughly investigated. That is what we have done in this case. I appreciate that the Chairman will respond to us by letter but I thought it important to get those points across as clearly as I could.