 On 14 January 2005 MLE's Board announced that the lab would be put into voluntary liquidation and close.In the declaration of insolvency Ernst & Young, the liquidator, noted a surplus of €325,000.Commenting in "The Irish Times", Nicholas Negroponte, the founder of the MIT Media Lab, said that the research at MLE was "beyond [his] wildest expectations"; he was critical of European companies for their unwillingness to invest in the lab and said