Mr. Brendan McDonagh:

My position was that I would not be party to a sell-off of the portfolio that would involve huge losses when I believed that there would be longer-term value in the portfolio if we kept our cool and rode it out. That was the right thing to do and I stand by that decision to this day. People talk about NAMA selling off assets in 2010 or 2011 and argue that we got very bad value. They point out that the buyers of those assets made lots of money afterwards but they must remember that at that time there was very little capital around in terms of people who were prepared to invest in Ireland. People also forget that most of our portfolio was in Ireland and we had only sold €1 billion of that portfolio by the end of 2012. That was a very strategic decision made by the NAMA board to sell a certain amount into the market to get the market going. Every time we sold property we were getting the best possible value at the time. We knew that the people who bought that property would probably make a substantial profit on it in the future but what could we do? We needed to generate cash to reach the €7.5 billion target.