Mr. Brendan McDonagh:

I will refer to what the Comptroller and Auditor General said in his own report when he stated that when NAMA acquired the loans, there was an effective interest rate of 5%. That basically said that we were expected to return 5% on the assets over time. In the section 226 report, he stated that our return was 6.2%, so we have exceed the 5% target. That is a financial measure as much as internal rate of return.

NAMA had a mixed bag of assets. It had some really bad assets, which the banks lent on and were not worth very much. Even if one had held them from 2010 until today, one might get less today that what one got because the land might have been dezoned and one might have had issues on the cost of holding and the remediation of the asset. NAMA had some very good assets, medium quality assets and really poor quality assets in a mixed portfolio.

What I said earlier in terms of the business we have, the business that is most comparable to the private sector is our residential funding business. The board has set an internal rate of return target of 15% on that and we are achieving in excess of that in any of the projects we are funding at present. Consequently, we have internal procedures.