Mr. Gerry Fitzpatrick:

I think for someone to give a disclosure in relation to a judgment, they have to have data to support that judgment. And warning of concerns in the future of something that might happen is given in the financial statements. And again, I referenced that in my opening statement that the standard makes it clear that there are ... it's based on judgment and that loss, impairment losses may be different depending on how events turn out. But, ultimately, to give any quantification of that, you would actually have to have better data and I think the situation the directors faced was in looking at the valuation of ... of loans was to establish what was the ... what was the data. They were relying on market data and I think if you recall at the time, we now know in relation to, for instance, house prices, the property index was 100 in 2005. In 2009, it was only 92. It took until 2011, 2012 for it to go down to 67.

So some suggestion with hindsight that the directors knew that this was going to happen I would have ... I would have had a major concern if I thought the directors believed that their judgments were over-optimistic and I would certainly bring that to their attention. And through the audit process I, by looking at individual loans ... there's a process for challenge of that data ... but the challenge we gave was to look at both that bottom-up analysis of loans and on a case-by-case basis, which was being done across the bank in a credit review process but also to try and look at a top-down analysis to say, "Well, looking at your loan portfolio and looking at how it is supported by collateral, what type of impairment loss would you expect given what we had seen in the market?"

So I think the challenge and you referenced concerns, I think the issue is one of challenge from my perspective showing scepticism to say, "Is your judgment based on data that is available?" And to look for any contradictory evidence of other data that might suggest it wasn't available, but to flag some concern that things might get worse, you need to put some quantification on it and I don't think that would have been appropriate.