This is your first set of year-end results. Take us through the highlights.

What these results show is the expanding scale of the business over the last 12 months, on so many different levels. To pick out a few numbers, obviously the most significant driver of the profit before tax has been the capital gains increase of £197m, and that compares to £145m, which was for a 14-month period that ended in March 2006.

The core income, which is the underlying income excluding the capital gains, increased by 23% over the prior year. That 23% growth, in a period of time when we’ve invested a huge amount in the business and infrastructure is a really important result.

So what’s been the impact of declining spreads on your results?

The actual impact on this set of results is limited. This set of results is mainly impacted by the deals that we’ve done in earlier periods, so we should see that flow through into the current results.

Costs have increased by over 60%. Why is that?

Costs went up by £39m to just over £100m. And, of course, some of it is just the scale of the business. We increased headcount from 80 to 102 people, and the loan book has grown by 17 per cent, so we are just a larger business. We’ve invested in new offices, as we talked about before, in Tokyo and Sydney. And also we continue to invest in the infrastructure of the business and we brought on a number of professionals in the support functions.

The final area where costs have increased is in our legal and professional fees. We've restructured the balance sheet; that had a cost attached. We've also raised funds in the year, and those costs have been largely expensed during the year.

When you presented the interim results, you mentioned you wanted to look at the strength and the efficiency of the balance sheet. So what changes have you made?

We’ve looked at our three major borrowing facilities and all of those have been amended in some way. From a quantum point of view, all of them are larger, so we’ve gone from £1.5bn of facilities to £2bn.

We’re taking advantage of the liquid markets and the pricing is more beneficial for us. We have got more flexibility in terms of the jurisdictions, geographies, that we can invest in, in terms of the types of investment, where on the balance sheet we can invest and what grade of debt we can invest in.

What are your priorities for the coming year?

I want to continue a lot of work that we’re doing on the risk management side.

We’re looking hard at tax and at treasury; particularly on the treasury side. As I mentioned at the half-year, we changed our treasury policy and we’ve done a lot of work on making sure that’s much more aligned to the way the business model has changed and particularly the dynamics of pricing and specifically roll-up rather than cash paid interest.

The other area which I'm really going to focus on is the infrastructural or the support functions of the business. I want us to continually evolve those so that we're supporting the investment side.

We are really backing up what we think is an exceptionally good investment team and network around the world, with very good support systems and colleagues in those functions that can allow the business to over-perform.

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