Mr. Brian Cowen:

Well, what changed the situation was we had the Pricewaterhouse exercise and we had the Jones LaSalle exercise - the valuers went in as well. They assessed what the situation was for all six banks. We then had, in November ... late-October-November, you had the Minister for Finance meeting with bank executives, firstly, in Farmleigh and, secondly, in the Department, maybe a week or two later, making the point to them that the market situation had moved where they needed to have capital ... more capital in the bank, that they were going ... that they needed to get capital if they could get it themselves and if they couldn't get it, that the Government were going to have to make our move and get it to get it into the system and that obviously there would be a price to pay for that.

On the Anglo situation, we had indicated ... of the €10 billion recapitalisation package, that €1.5 billion would go into Anglo, if you recall. What was envisaged at that stage was that that would probably be worth about 75% of the shareholding. We then had ... went in and did some due diligence on the basis that we were considering doing that. And what emerged from that was some of the corporate governance issues that arose. We also had the resignation of the chairman of the bank. We'd the resignation of the chief executive of the bank. We had a situation where ... share price was under attack again because of loss of confidence this time ... completely. And then there was also liquidity problems re-emerging in the bank in terms of outflows, people taking deposits out. So that led us then to a situation where we had to consider a further step which was a nationalisation of the bank. The Minister for Finance took advice on those issues from the requisite people - from Central Bank, from regulator, from NTMA and all the rest of it. This was now into January and I was away on this trade mission in Japan and he rang me to discuss all this with me and say to me that he felt that we now needed to urgently nationalise the bank. I discussed that with him as to who was saying that, what was the ... what was the background to that. He went through all that in great detail and I then said, "Okay, we'll authorise the holding of a Government meeting and you can put a memo to Cabinet today."