Professor Philip Lane:

These are legal contracts. One person might read the wording in a straightforward fashion. This is where the transparency issue comes in. There is an issue of interpretation of some of these terms. In some of the trackers it is not the case that the contracts said that it was the ECB rate plus a fixed margin, but rather phrases such as "the then prevailing rate", as we discussed earlier. Unfortunately, if it were as crystal clear as the Chairman suggests, we would not have faced the issues that arose. The contracts are complex, ambiguously phrased, and there is non-transparency. Even over and above the contract, there is an issue with surrounding material such as brochures.