Mr. Brendan McDonagh:

It is not unusual that firms such as Brown Rudnick would go out and seek deals and try to get in a position to be able to promote that deal to third parties and get a fee. That happens quite regularly. Therefore, when Brown Rudnick went out and tried to "source the deal", its fee was only going to be paid if the portfolio was sold. From our point of view, we want to sell the portfolio for the best price we can get for it. We were very clear from the outset that we wanted £1.3 billion for the portfolio, as that is what we valued the underlying portfolio at, and we got £1.3 billion for it.

A large portfolio can be broken into small or large parts, but as I outlined in my statement today, this was a very granular, quite poor portfolio in that there was a large number of small value assets, over 50% of it in Northern Ireland and 33% of it in regional United Kingdom areas. We would be a long time working through that portfolio trying to realise each individual asset, because there is not huge demand for granular portfolios like that. As can be seen from the case of other banks that are selling granular portfolios, there is a certain type of private equity buyer who buys that sort of portfolio. PIMCO, obviously, expressed an interest in the portfolio, Cerberus expressed an interest in it and Fortress expressed an interest in it. They are the type of buyers who buy these granular portfolios.

Therefore, for such a big deal ticket or big cheque, of £1.3 billion, there are not too many people out there who can do that who are interested in this type of portfolio. We researched this and discussed it with our loan supervisor, Lazard. We are satisfied there was competitive tension up to the very end of the process. This is a big portfolio. We did everything right. We did not accommodate any interference or involvement of Mr. Cushnahan. We sought confirmations from Cerberus and it has confirmed to the media that it sought confirmations from both Tughans and Brown Rudnick. It is not unusual that companies like Brown Rudnick would go around the place, in terms of people or companies that would approach NAMA or other financial institutions, saying they might have somebody who would be interested in a portfolio and asking whether we had a portfolio that had these characteristics coming to the market.

From our point of view, we must make sure we run a fair process. We ran a very fair process, with a data room which controlled access to the data, controlled information in that data room, with information provided at the same time to all bidders. We achieved the price we aimed for in January 2014 when the deal closed in April 2014.