Mr. Wim Verbraeken:

I would like to specify that we have not engaged in any transaction that involves the sale of a portfolio of mortgages. As we stipulated in the questionnaire, we sold a small portfolio of residual balances. They were mortgages for which the collateral had been realised. The remaining unsecured claims for a total nominal amount of €140 million were sold to a specialist firm earlier in 2017. We have not sold any portfolio or any loan to NAMA, which is part of the reason our non-performing loan ratios at this stage are still quite high.

On the recognition of defaults, we follow the strictest interpretation of European-wide European Banking Federation rules which, essentially, set best practice and guidelines for how financial institutions should recognise defaults. We apply the strictest definition. In addition, we apply very strict definitions and interpretations of cure criteria. In practice, this means that a loan qualifies quite quickly as a default or non-performing, but it takes a lot of time for it to be cured back to performing. It needs to meet a significant number of conditions before it can be considered to be performing. This is to avoid inflows and outflows on a regular basis of the same loan. Clearly, it is something that is applied by KBC on a group-wide basis and one of the reasons the level of our non-performing loans is relatively high in Ireland.