Professor Willie Donnelly:

Maybe Deputy Cullinane will understand if he lets me finish. The IP policy said that the requirement for assignment was €140,000. Uniquely, this company, maybe because I was a shareholder, was required to meet more stringent conditions. We had €400,000 on the table from a set of venture capital companies in November. Anyone who knows how the system works for venture capital companies will say that, if that deal was not closed by December, the venture capital companies would have walked away for tax reasons. As the vice president for research, and not as a shareholder, and with the financial controller knowing I had a conflict, I said that, from my perspective, the institute needed to accept what was on the table because it was well beyond what was in our intellectual property policy.