Mr. Colm Kincaid:

I will try to address that. Under the current regime, the first thing a company has to do is prudently estimate how much money and resources it will need to meet its liabilities on an expected basis, so it takes a prudent approach to what is expected to happen and it sets aside resources to meet that. We spoke earlier about the inspection we carried out in October and into November, in which we looked at the claims files. What we noticed on the claims files was that what the claims team was estimating as the amount it might need for the claim seemed low. That is what we meant when we said earlier that one cannot extrapolate from that into anything else. How much is held in terms of reserves really depends on a company's prudential assessment of what it thinks its liabilities are going to be. The solvency margin is then a measure of freely available assets it must maintain over and above that to act as a buffer against unexpected shocks. If I follow the Deputy's reasoning correctly, one cannot extrapolate from the number of policyholders necessarily or the quantum of reserves that are shown in the statement of affairs as to what the prudential level of reserving should be, because that is something that only the prudential supervisor and the company itself could do with all of the financial information.