• Question by: Angie Bray
• Meeting date: 16 November 2005

Who will be paying the interest on that loan? Will that be passed back to Council Taxpayers?

• Question by: Angie Bray
• Meeting date: 16 November 2005

Who will be paying the interest on that loan?

• Question by: Angie Bray
• Meeting date: 16 November 2005

Who is funding the bridging loan, however, as you called it previously?

• Question by: Angie Bray
• Meeting date: 16 November 2005

Therefore there will be no borrowing, because she was talking about possibly having to borrow the money?

• Question by: Angie Bray
• Meeting date: 16 November 2005

If the Mary Reilly (Chair, LDA) prediction about it going above £1 billion is to be proved right, you are saying that Council Taxpayers will not to have to pay a penny towards that. Where will that money be coming from?

• Question by: Angie Bray
• Meeting date: 16 November 2005

Here we go. As we have already pointed out, Cassandra was always right about most things but nobody believed her at the time.

• Question by: Dee Doocey
• Meeting date: 16 November 2005

The Government's behaviour in this whole thing is quite disgraceful. They are sitting pretty; under the rules of the IOC they had to sign up to be the ultimate guarantor and they then say that they wish to discharge or they hope to discharge this in a sharing arrangement with the Mayor, whoever is the Mayor, and the Lottery but meanwhile they are pulling in millions of pounds from all Olympic activities. They are going to pull it in from VAT, from tax on the Lottery, from national insurance and income tax from extra people that are taken on by...

• Question by: Angie Bray
• Meeting date: 16 November 2005

Can I just take you back to something you said to Dee Doocey (AM) about your leadership, if it is required at the time and there is an overspend and Londoners are required to fund that along with the Lottery. You are saying it would be at that point that you would robustly negotiate on behalf of Londoners but that should not be the case. Why is it then that it took Tessa Jowell (Secretary of State for Culture, Media and Sport) to admit to the Committee that there is to be absolutely no cap on what Londoners might have...

• Question by: Angie Bray
• Meeting date: 16 November 2005

I think it makes you look ridiculous as a negotiator and frankly, if that is the way we can expect to see you conduct negotiations for the next 10 years with all kinds of businesses, I think it is a very depressing pattern of behaviour. Do you not think you might learn something from this and do that kind of negotiating in private rather than blathering all over the place about crises and all sorts of things?

• Question by: Dee Doocey
• Meeting date: 16 November 2005

Can I ask you specifically about the LDA land acquisition costs because the Financial Times ran an article on 2 November saying that their original costs, which were just under £0.5 billion, were now estimated to go to just over £1 billion, i.e. a 100% increase. Can you comment on that? Is that figure correct?