Mr. Brendan McDonagh:

There were very few loans that came to NAMA which we would call syndicated lending. Syndicated lending is very common in other markets that effectively no banks takes a total 100% exposure to projects. They usually try to get other banks to come in to share the risks, but in the Irish market, there was only about five syndicated loans that came to NAMA. But it did mean that a debtor might have borrowed, say, €500 million from the NAMA banks and he might have borrowed another €250 million from a non-NAMA bank which was operating in the market but they were completely separate. Usually in that situation, we ask the debtors when they submitted their business plans to tell us have you money borrowed from other banks and what is the arrangement for them. Sometimes it is like a juggling act, that money was moving between assets which were funded by NAMA banks and assets which were funded by non-NAMA banks, by the debtor because he was trying to keep the balls in the air in terms of trying to keep everybody satisfied. When we came in we said listen, this is our money, you have to deal with your other bank separately. In cases of syndicate arrangements, there was a code of practice which was required as part of European Commission approval where effectively we had to work with those institutions to effectively ... we would operate together in a fair practice with each other to try and make sure both parties were not disadvantaged at ... against each other. That was where the lending was in a common project but there was very few lending to common projects.