Mr. Oliver Ellingham:

Let us do it in parts. A whole series of factors came into the reason we looked at selling this. Somebody came forward to buy it. At the time, we thought there was no single party interested in buying the lot. That is a fact. We then had the political forces saying if we did decide to sell these assets, it would be unhelpful to have Northern Ireland hawked around by a State agency in the South. That was fine. We then said our policy was not to have closed sales so everything had to go through some kind of competitive process. We then said we needed as competitive a process as could be had for one this size while taking into account the request that these would not be hawked around on the front page of The Irish Times. That was the position. At no point were we ever asked to sell these assets at below our section 10 price. It is very important that people bear in mind that we had a view as to the number we could sell these assets for while keeping faith with our section 10 obligation. That, in our mind, was £1.3 billion.