"We are pleased to announce a sound set of results with no exposure to sub prime mortgages or structured products"

Colin Keogh, Chief Executive Interim Report statement 3 March 2008, Close Brothers Group plc.

1. We are a UK bank authorised and regulated by the Financial Services Authority, and members of the Financial Services Compensation Scheme.

2. We have no exposure to US sub prime debt, nor to any other instruments where there is a significant risk that we might not be able to get our money back.

3. Close Brothers maintains high liquidity at all times. In contrast to many other banks, we have for many years followed a policy of borrowing long and lending short.

4. We rely primarily for funding our loan book on committed borrowing facilities from major UK and international banks. These facilities range out to 10 years and even longer in duration.

5. Additionally, our customer deposit base exceeds our loan book in size. At our half year in January 2008 our deposit base was £2.4bn compared to our loan book of £2.0bn.

6. Our loan book is relatively short term in duration, a significant proportion being repaid to us within 6 months. Our average loan size at our last year end of 31/7/07 was less than £10k. To reduce our risk further, our loan book is spread across a variety of sectors.

7. We do not trade in money market instruments, which we hold for liquidity and yield purposes.

8. We do not speculate in derivatives.

9. Most of our business is transacted in sterling and our currency exposure is minimal.

10. We place our short term customer deposits with a small range of high quality, highly credit rated UK and international banks.

11. We are highly credit rated ourselves by 2 of the world's largest credit rating agencies:

Moody's short term rating for us, covering periods of up to one year, is P1. This is their highest rating and they define as "issuers rated Prime-1 have a superior ability to repay short-term debt obligations".

Fitch's short term rating for us is F1. This they define in part as "highest credit quality. Indicates the strongest capacity for timely payment of financial commitments".

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