Mr. Nick Ashmore:

We did not. The SBCI was not set up to provide bailout funding for anybody. Its focus is 100% on SMEs and Irish businesses. We design our supports to benefit these businesses, not the funding providers with which we work. They have to pass the benefit through.

Under the original liquidity lending scheme that we offered - it still applies through the non-bank institutions - we allowed funds to be used for investment purposes. It was driven strongly by Kreditanstalt für Wiederaufbau, KfW. One of its requirements was that its funding be used for investment purposes. We also used it for working capital purposes. A third category involved situations where SMEs needed to refinance loans provided by banks that had left the market and were no longer extending credit. That clearly was not a solution. However, we felt their gravity was important enough that the support should be extended to them also. That is fair enough because those businesses were the ones most beset by the challenges of the crisis. If one is extending a discount, it should be extended to them also. Ordinarily, a policy driven measure such as this would not extend a discount to a situation where there is refinancing because there is no economic benefit to the State from a refinancing. However, when a business is trapped with a lender which is no longer extending credit, we should make sure supports are available in that context. The credit guarantee scheme incorporated these criteria in its 2015 version, but it has been slightly tweaked in the current version. Originally, the criteria were tied to five identified exiting institutions. Now they have been extended to ensure that if a SME's current finances are from an institution that is no longer going to extend credit as a result of the crisis, regardless of which it is, in that institution the credit guarantee scheme is applicable.