Brian Lenihan Jnr (Dublin West, Fianna Fail)

Deputy Bruton will appreciate that the amount of information at our disposal at this stage is necessarily interim in character. It is not possible to arrive at a final assessment on some of the questions he asked. It is clear that when the regulator saw the difficulty, his immediate and proper instinct was to apply to the court to protect the position. With regard to the persons for whose benefit the transactions were executed, they are creditors of the general group who lie outside the insurance company position and in that context, any instruments executed for their benefit create rights in them outside the insurance company and deplete the insurance company's assets thereby. That is the essential difficulty which has arisen here. As to the parties who executed those transactions, that is an investigative matter for the particular companies in question. As outlined in my reply, they are subsidiaries of the insurance company.

As to the degree of regulatory participation or consent or assent sought, as I understand the position at this stage, no such asset or consent was sought and these transactions-----

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