Brian Lenihan Jnr (Dublin West, Fianna Fail)

The €120 billion included was a notional figure, based on the value of the collateral at peak; it was not a book value. It added to the book value the actual peak value of the property in measuring the decline since. This is important. This was part of the debate before NAMA but it was never suggested that this figure was the actual book value.

Deputy Gogarty expressed it well. It is simply making explicit what is implicit. It is clarifying that a bank in another jurisdiction has to comply with local law. I also reiterate what Deputy Gogarty said, rightly, that the bulk of these assets are in jurisdictions such as Great Britain, the United States, other European jurisdictions, where there is no complaint about the system of taxation or bank regulation.

I do not have the figures for the three jurisdictions referred to by Deputy Burton, the Isle of Man, Bermuda and Switzerland. In the case of the Isle of Man and Bermuda, I do not think we are aware of any assets going into NAMA from those jurisdictions. I will have to check out the situation with regard to Switzerland but any amount would probably be very small. Deputy Burton has done an intensive analysis and study of the doings of Irish developers for a long number of years and I am sure if they were very involved in any of these countries, she would have advised me what developments they were building there. The leading location is Ireland, which has 66.8%. Northern Ireland has 6.2%, Great Britain has 20%, the US has 2.7%, followed by Germany, Portugal, France, the Czech Republic, Italy and Spain. This list is then followed by a category called, "Other" which has 0.3% of the total bank assets being transferred. I am not in a position to give the Deputy the precise figures for the three jurisdictions she mentioned but they are clearly a fraction of 0.3%, if anything. One would assume there might be some Swiss building, given that Switzerland is a substantial country and one would assume that the Isle of Man and Bermuda are most unlikely because there is not very much scope for building operations in either of those countries. That is all I want to say about it.

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