Mr. Frank O'Connor:

I will give a reminder on the IMF, which is what I would call the expensive portion of the money. When one is above one's quota with the IMF the credit margin in the early years was 3% plus the reference rates – the special drawing rights, SDR, reference rate – but after three years if one does not start to repay the IMF another per cent is added. Three years into it one is talking about a 4% credit margin plus the SDR reference rate, which is why we always talk about IMF money costing 4% to 5%. When our bond yields started to cross 3% into 2%, there was a desire to repay the IMF early.

European loans are different. European loan are for much longer than the IMF loans and they are cheaper. In simple terms, the European money, through the ESFS facility and the EFSM are rated AAA and AA. We are rated A. One should remember that the pace at which investors expect the money to change from all the other debt we have to fund and the institutional debt coming back into that traditional investor base is different. I will give one example, the ESFM had to roll one of its maturities so it lent us money by issuing a bond until 2015. It had to roll that because it had committed to us not repaying until after 2027. It did three deals at an average of 14 years. It went to the market with an array of bonds.

This was December 2015, or just before it. They funded it at 1.13%. The same 14 year bond that we had, our 2030 bond at that time, was trading at 1.8% so the European one does not arise at this time.