John Collins talks interest rates with Conor Pope and the disability business case with Caroline Casey of Kanchi, the latest mobile gadgets with Ciara O’Brien and a new interactive songbook with i-Tab founder Andy Hirst.
Former Anglo Irish Bank chief executive David Drumm outside the federal court in Boston in 2010
So David Drumm ran a €72 billion loan book while chief executive of Anglo Irish Bank but wasn’t able to get a handle on his personal finances? (more…)
Irish Times journalists Simon Carswell and Laura Slattery discuss the merger of Anglo and Irish Nationwide, Dermot O’Leary of Goodbody’s on Ireland’s debt burden, and Pat Burke of Grant Thornton on business confidence.
John Collins talks to Dan O’Brien about economic predictions for 2011, Suzanne Lynch about Greencore’s stalled merger, Dr Diarmuid O’Brien of Nanoweek and Oren Michels from US software firm Mashery.
John Collins talks to Barry Wallace of The Good Agent, hears from Paul Kelly of Food and Drink Industry Ireland about sugar shortages, while Ciaran Hancock discusses property investor Brian O’Donnell.
The former Greencore sugar factory at Carlow
Greencore’s decision to get of sugar production at the earliest available opportuity to concentrate on its international chilled foods business is increasingly looking questionable.
Last November an EU auditors report found that the decision to close the last sugar plant at Mallow was based on outdated data and that the closure actually cost more than keeping Mallow open. As a result an Oireachtas committee is looking into the closure but Greencore boss Patrick Coveney told the Committee on Agriculture, Fisheries and Food Greencore had no plans to get back into sugar. (more…)
Despite the Finance Bill being the focus of intense political debate and disagreement (although some level of consensus seems to have emerged tonight) it’s doubtful that many of our politicians have actually read the full document. At 223 pages long you could forgive them for not having read it in full. The Department of Finance provides a handy 22-page explanatory memorandum which does provide some guidance as you plough through the hundreds of pages of legalese. (more…)
Shareholders in public companies get the chance once a year to pass verdict on directors. But in the case of Irish-quoted companies small shareholders can rarely if ever do more than lodge a protest vote. The support of the institutional shareholders, who hold the bulk of the shares, has generally been secured well in advance of the AGM.
Given some of the high profile and costly lapses in corporate governance at companies of all sizes in recent years the new Board Performance Evaluation Service from the Institute of Directors in Ireland (IoD Ireland) is a welcome introduction.
Eight months in development the service combines online tools with in-person interviews from experienced independent assesors. Aimed at organisations of all types and size it evaluates the board’s performance in areas such as strategy, business principles, risk management and internal control, performance and measurement, stakeholder management, board composition and boardroom practice. At the end of the process IoD Ireland delivers a report to the company making recommendations on actions that are required.
“Good corporate governance makes good business sense,” Maura Quinn, chief executive of the Institute of Directors in Ireland, told my colleague Ciara O’Brien yesterday. “It shouldn’t be based on regulation, or because someone might be looking over you shoulder. This is good business.”
This morning we launched the new look business section of irishtimes.com. Regular readers of the site will notice some pretty significant changes so I thought I’d explain the thinking behind them.
In the top navigation of the site you’ll now see something called Sectors, rather than Latest. On our business team we’ve got specialists covering a range of different areas from the pharmaecutical industry to the energy sector. Each of those industries now has its own homepage so if, for example, you are mostly interested in media & marketing there is a dedicated page with all the latest news from that sector.
In the Opinion & Analysis section we’ve also made it easier to find articles by some of our best known writers namely business editor John McManus, economics editor Dan O’Brien, finance correspondent Simon Carswell and business affairs correspondent Ciaran Hancock.
We think the new layout better highlights the breadth of our business coverage – not just in terms of what’s written for the paper but also the unique content we are creating for the web on a daily basis.
We plan some further changes in the coming weeks – including expanded data coverage of international and local markets. We’d love your feedback on the changes, either in the comments below or by emailing finance@irishtimes.com.
John Collins, assistant business editor.
It has to be said The Fitzpatrick Tapes is compelling reading. When I first heard about Tom Lyons and Brian Carey book in The Sunday Times I had reservations. What had the two journalists agreed to in order to get the former Anglo Irish Bank boss Sean FitzPatrick to speak at length on the record – something he has streadfastly reused to do since the collapse of his beloved institution?
Tom Lyons covers off the genesis of the book very well in his introduction. FitzPatrick wanted to give his side of the story and Lyons put in the groundwork to win his trust and cooperation.
The issue is that FitzPatrick’s claims around many key events are hard to swallow – even for his colleagues. The authors call him out on some of these claims – such as not knowing the identity of the “Maple 10″, the Anglo clients who bought 10 per cent of Sean Quinn’s stake in the bank. FitzPatrick himself acknowledges that others have different memories of key events – in one case Anglo exec Pat Whelan has phone records to prove he informed him the deal was close to completion. But even then FitzPatrick can’t say he was wrong – just that he believed Whelan.
The true worth of the book, however, is how it has driven the news agenda this week and shown there are significant gaps in our knowledge about events running up to the bank guarantee. The revelations about FitzPatrick’s golf game with the Taoiseach have now been followed with the news that Cowen assembled a kitchen cabinet at Druid’s Glen but apparently one which did not discuss the elephant in the room – the ailing Anglo.
While much more rounded accounts of the meltdown in Irish banking will emerge, and are currently being worked on, The Fitzpatrick Tapes is a compelling, if by its nature limited, contribution to the publics knowledge of events that have helped bring our economy to its knees.
