Mr. Seamus McCarthy:

It is a very significant figure, but it is a very large portfolio. In 2013, this loan portfolio had a rent roll of approximately £100 million and had many assets. An attempt has been made to characterise these assets in the north of England or Scotland as being of a poor quality, but their quality is not that poor. They actually have value. The day the sale of the loans goes through, access to the value of those assets is gone as well. One loses some value as soon as that decision is made. Nobody is disputing that if one chooses to have a loan portfolio sale, rather than working that portfolio out, the market will expect to discount those loans and will not pay one the equivalent asset value for them, and there is a loss as a result. I am certainly not disputing that. Everybody in the market will agree with the advice NAMA got from external advisers, even subsequently, which was that it could expect to take a loss. That is what the figure of £190 million relates to. It is based on projections and expressed in net present value terms. If one looks at the cashflow, NAMA was projecting forward to 2020 that it would end up with a net £1.675 billion in cash. It is a question of how to evaluate the choice to give up the expectation of getting a net £1.675 billion. In other words, what price would one take today for it?

That is what discounting is designed to achieve.