Mr. Tony O'Brien:

One of the conflicts of interest the Deputy raised also relates to the former auditors of the entity. The first hurdle the trust had to overcome was securing the services of an independent auditor, which was achieved last November. A big issue that had to be resolved - the Deputy may not have been in the room at the time - was the reconstruction from the ground up of the asset register and, to some extent, the income register for that period of 2023. I have been on the record elsewhere as saying that one feature of the 2023 accounts will be a very significant restatement - that is to say a correction - of the balance sheet published in the 2022 accounts. In order to get there, and for the new board to satisfy its governance obligations to make all the appropriate disclosures, it has taken longer than we envisaged but the timetable is now confirmed to me by our auditors. They expect to have draft accounts with us by the middle of next month. We will need a couple of weeks or so to do our due diligence. It is really important because it is impossible to be compliant either with charities regulation, approved housing body regulation or the terms of the special measures without publishing those. I expect we are only a matter of weeks away now. As I said earlier, it is one of the more difficult audits I have ever been involved in and I have been involved in lots of interesting audits in other capacities. We are very close now.