Ms Aileen Colley:

The sequence of events shows that the apology was always one of the key themes for the interactions that happened in December. When one then brings that forward to January, and the people in question were asked if they had given the apology, their first response was that they did apologise. On the back of that, the information was supplied from the local team through to the national office and the Committee of Public Accounts. It was subsequent to that that we actually discovered what happened, through my direct interactions with the two people concerned, and they clarified for me that when they had said they had given an apology it was actually a personal statement of sympathy and remorse. On finding out - that was after the Committee of Public Accounts-----