The most important guideline that the authoritative bodies implemented for SPEs, the so-called 3 percent rule, proved to be extremely controversial. This rule allowed a company to omit an SPE’s assets and liabilities from its consolidated financial statements as long as parties independent of the company provided a minimum of 3 percent of the SPE’s capital. Almost immediately, the 3 percent threshold became both a technical minimum and a practical maximum. That is, large companies using the SPE structure arranged for external parties to provide exactly 3 percent of an SPE’s total. The remaining 97 percent of an SPE’s capital was typically contributed by loans from external lenders, loans arranged and generally collateralized by the company that created the SPE.