On the 28th October last year a report was produced called ‘Council deposits in Icelandic banks – Supplementary report’. The report was a report of the the Leader and Cabinet member for resources who is of course Mike Freer. The report is exempt which means that I cannot tell you what is in it. However I can tell you that it was the information contained in this report that alerted the working party on Icelandic banks that the treasury team had not followed their own strategy.

Given that it was very clear in this report that there was a problem then it seems to me that it must be equally clear that the owner of the report must have known this to be the case. If he didn’t then either he didn’t read his own report, or he didn’t understand it. If a committee that as far as I know has no banking experts on it can spot the problem then surely someone with a background in banking would see it straight away?