Mr. Brendan McDonagh:

We have heard all the same stories because we have been getting calls every day from people telling us different things that are going on. At the start, when we inherited loans, some of the expenditure seemed to be high. That is why we put in the financial monitors who said a contract for cleaning a building should be X amount per annum. If it turned out the debtor was claiming more we told him to get a new supplier to do it. I am not saying it did not happen but that from 2011, once we got hold of the portfolio and wanted to lock down as much cash as possible and have it remitted to us, we started to put those procedures in place. Like anything, we can put in as many controls as possible and think they are working effectively but people can be quite ingenious in how they try to extract money. We did as much as we possibly could to lock it down and make sure that whatever is being charged is appropriate for that service. At the start we did not have too many benchmarks but as time went on we got more and we were able to see where somebody stood out. Sometimes there may be a genuine reason where a service costs more in one building than it did in another. If it was explained and we accepted it, that was fine.