Mr. Brendan McDonagh:

We try to look at everything we can do in such situations. The reality is that, because we only have the loans and not the assets, we need somebody to act as receiver to get control of the assets. No receiver would take it on once the receiver resigned. The receivers all talk to each other and would know who was involved and the reasons the receiver resigned. There was then the problem of appointing a sales agent to sell it. The receiver could not get any local sales agent to take it and none of the national sales agents were interested either. There was then a situation where the assets would effectively be abandoned and left there. All of the difficulties, including those the HSE contacted us about, would have got worse and worse over time and would have to be dealt with. This was an extremely exceptional situation. There was no recovery because the companies were bankrupt or liquidated and the debtors had gone bankrupt so we could not get anything back other than the value of the assets. Believe me, I want every single penny out of every single asset. I work my hardest every single day to achieve that. With regard to there being no set process, it is very hard to have a set process when you do not have any options.