Ms Marie Hunt:

I would not say they were the biggest players but they certainly were one of the biggest players. Ironically, the syndicate model came out of Government tax policy. When the first tax schemes were developed in the late 1990s, the syndicate model emerged and we began to see wealth management firms putting the syndicate model in place. They were invariably to avail of tax reliefs in the first instance.

What happened is that some of those tax reliefs were subsequently removed or ring-fenced. The syndicate model worked well because it was deemed that ordinary individuals who maybe did not have €1 million to buy a commercial property in their own right could put money into a fund and through a pooled fund of money could get access to commercial real estate. Otherwise it would have been too big a leap for them in their own personal capacity to get into commercial property.