STATE-OWNED Anglo Irish Bank is expected to name Australian banker Mike Aynsley as its new chief executive shortly, The Irish Timeshas learned.
Mr Aynsley, who is from Sydney, has experience of working in the banking industry in Australia and Asia, and has more recently worked as a consultant for Deloitte and for his own practice specialising in risk and corporate governance projects around the globe.
He previously worked for Security Pacific, which is now part of Bank of America, in the late 1980s; stockbroker Hoare Govett, which has since become part of Royal Bank of Scotland; and former National Irish Bank owner National Australia Bank where he was head of capital markets and treasury during the 1990s.
He also spent two years as head of risk at Australia and New Zealand (ANZ) Banking Group.
The appointment has yet to be approved by the Financial Regulator, which is still carrying out fitness and probity checks on Mr Aynsley, as is normal in the appointment of a chief executive to a financial institution. However, industry sources said they expect the appointment to be approved.
Minister for Finance Brian Lenihan is also expected to approve the appointment.
A spokeswoman for Anglo Irish declined to comment. The bank has been without a chief executive since last December when David Drumm resigned after it emerged that the bank had concealed loans of up to €122 million to its former chairman Seán FitzPatrick over an eight-year period.
The bank was nationalised in January and has been plagued by controversy relating to back-to-back deposits totalling €7.5 billion with Irish Life Permanent which flattered the bank’s balance sheet at its financial year end in September 2008, and by a secretive share transaction in which a 10 per cent stake in the bank was placed with 10 long-standing customers with non-recourse loans from the bank.
In February, the Government asked a non-executive director of the bank, Donal O’Connor, to manage the lender as executive chairman until Mr Drumm’s replacement was found.
Anglo Irish posted the largest loss in Irish corporate history this year when it made a loss of €4.1 billion in the six months to March 2009 due to large impairments on its property loans.
The bank is also expected to announce several hundred redundancies among its 1,700-strong workforce shortly after the announcement of Mr Aynsley’s appointment.
The bank remuneration committee established by the Government under the bank guarantee scheme set the Anglo chief executive’s salary at €545,000, but Mr Lenihan later reduced the cap for senior bank executives to €500,000.
Married with four children, Mr Aynsley has worked in London, New York and Tokyo. During his stint at National Australia Bank, he set up a European capital markets operation for the bank establishing treasury and corporate banking units in London in 1996.
Described as an experienced banker in capital markets and risk management, Mr Aynsley, who is in his early 50s, is said to have strong analytical skills and strategic vision. He has an expertise in understanding complex financial derivatives and related instruments.
During his time as a consultant in recent years, he has worked for the Asian Development Bank, which provides finance to projects to fight poverty in the region.
Mr Aynsley will be the first external appointment to Anglo Irish Bank’s executive team. The bank is also planning to appoint an external candidate to the role of chief risk officer, which is held in an acting capacity by Peter Butler, the former head of Anglo Irish’s wealth management division.
Mr O’Connor told an Oireachtas committee in June that the bank would also be appointing a new chief financial officer, head of group lending, a head of group treasury, a head of operations and a head of finance.
“All of these jobs are in play. We have definitely said we will have an external chief executive and an external chief risk officer, and some of the other jobs will be filled externally,” he said.
