Mr. Paul O'Neill:

We awarded the contract in July 2016 when it was a solvent, profitable company but we do not rely only on the audited financial statements. We had the benefit of Carillion being a listed company. It was listed on the London stock exchange as a FTSE 250 company so we were able to assess the stock announcements it had been making, the share price and any material or press releases it had put out. We tried to go beyond the scope of audited financial statements but equally recognised that they remained the best independent verification of a company's health at a given time. We are continually looking at ways to improve and optimise our procedures so we are very cognisant of what is happening in the UK investigations and we are reviewing our own procedures to see what more we can do in addition to what we do. If it was a rated company we could rely on Moody's and Standard & Poor's and more independent verification reports to help us. We feel that at that time we did all we could to ensure that the entity was robust. We also considered the size of the project. This project represented 1% of the company's turnover so it was not simply a case of checking the audited financial statements. We looked at a broader scope.