ANALYSIS:WHEN JOHN MORAN worked as a solicitor for aircraft-leasing firm GPA in the early 1990s, he commuted between offices in Shannon and his hometown of Limerick in a black Toyota Celica.
The sight of a twentysomething professional driving the coupé in a Limerick suburb in recessionary times was unusual, but typical of Moran’s unswerving confidence.
His appointment as secretary general of the Department of Finance – replacing Kevin Cardiff, following his protracted appointment to the European Court of Auditors – is best described as the promotion of an outside insider.
Moran has only been working in the public service (first at the Central Bank and then at the Department of Finance) since July 2010. His appointment is a significant but not unexpected departure, given the criticism of the department’s pre-crisis stewardship of the economy and banking policy.
After GPA, Moran did a stint at McCann FitzGerald in New York and later at Zurich Bank, where he worked in Sydney, London and New York and set up Zurich Capital Markets in Ireland, a €1.5 billion business in the IFSC in Dublin.
To describe Moran’s career as eclectic is something of an understatement. The five-year gap (2005-2010) in his CV released by the department yesterday was filled by a colourful stint in France.
He set up and arranged finance for French “civil” companies to acquire and renovate three medieval houses in Cordes-sur-Ciel in the south of the country, and later set up a chain of smoothie bars and restaurants called JusSú.
He has a certificate in French from the Sorbonne in Paris and is a former chairman of the Swiss Irish Business Association.
He was renovating property in Dublin in 2010 when he applied for the role of head of wholesale banking supervision at the Central Bank, which was renovating its own post-crisis house after the regulatory failures of the past.
Moran’s year as head of banking at the department, working under fellow Limerickman Michael Noonan, has been a frenetic one.
His banking team, helped by the National Treasury Management Agency’s own banking team seconded to the department, has met targets for the restructuring of the banks set by the overseers in the troika and, in some cases, fulfilled the tasks well ahead of target.
Passing losses on to junior bondholders and raising cash from investors reduced the State’s share of the most recent €24 billion bank recapitalisations to €16.5 billion, but pushed the State’s overall bank bailout bill to €63 billion.
In Moran’s time at the department, six banks have become four. EBS has been reversed into AIB, and Anglo Irish Bank and Irish Nationwide have been merged. Bank of Ireland is the only bank to avoid State control due to Moran’s negotiations on the sale of a 35 per cent stake to investors in July.
Work on the future of Irish Life and Permanent is far from done.
Last year’s independent report into the department’s performance over the past decade criticised officials for failing to warn successive ministers strongly enough of the dangers of overheating policies.
Moran’s no-nonsense manner and track record in the cut-throat legal and financial private-sector world is unlikely to leave him exposed to a similar charge.
