Mr. Shane O'Sullivan:

This bank has offered a significant number of long-term treatments - 30,000 - over the past five or six years. We have a deep level of experience, therefore, of what customers went through in that period. I have met a large number of those customers and I understand the difficulty of their circumstances.

As Mr. Masding said in his opening remarks, when the bank looked at its NPL ratio of 25%, which is much higher than the other banks to which the Deputy referred, we worked to take out a large number of cases. Mr. Masding referred to a figure of 48%, or €2.6 billion, within which were vulnerable customers who were known to us and whose loans were removed from the sales process. Once the sale happened at the end of July, we no longer had a general discretion to remove cases because they are for the new owner to decide upon. As the committee has heard, the terms and conditions do not change and nor do the regulatory environment and the legal system. The new owner has the same responsibility to vulnerable customers as we do. I imagine that is how matters developed in that case.

On the question about performing loans, our NPL ratio is 25% but this transaction will bring that down to 16%.