Mr. Klaus Regling:

There are several instances in the report where we drew comparison with other countries and said that many of the factors that contributed to the problem in Ireland also existed in other countries. What struck us was that in Ireland all these factors we mentioned, which I summarised in my initial statement, were present but they were present to a stronger degree. This relates to supervision but it also relates to the governance problems within banks and the concentration risks which became bigger and bigger.

So it was all there but to a degree that one could not find in other countries, or not in all the areas in other countries. If one looks at the report, for instance, there are charts that show the increase in property lending by individual banks and the concentration on that sector of the economy. This is unprecedented. There are no other cases, although maybe a little bit in Spain, but in Spain the supervisors acted quite differently. It was really a multitude of factors that all interacted in the same negative direction and the degree to which these factors contributed to the problem.