Ms Karen Trant:

The report was commissioned in 2023 and it took six months. We required the various suppliers to provide their hedging strategies, obviously on a commercially sensitive and confidential basis. What we discovered, which speaks to Mr. Gannon's point, was that hedging strategies buffered the most severe and volatile crisis for Irish customers. At one point, they were 300% higher than the weighted average retail price, and that was because hedging was keeping it at a particular price. We also looked at their financial resilience because at that point we had a number of supplier-of-last-resort events where we had three suppliers leave the market because it was not commercially viable for them. We found that the hedging practices were in a way supporting customers. They were also supporting the entities themselves, so they could withstand the volatility. Within that report, we also looked at the underlying costs. We brought in financial experts to support us in that review. There was no evidence that prices were being kept artificially high. They were in line with underlying costs and hedging strategies.