Bank's shareholders less angry but still seeking answers

BACKGROUND:BANK OF Ireland meetings have become less angry affairs despite shareholders being asked twice to buy new shares to bail out the bank after their original shareholdings were wiped out.

There were even a few voices of support in the O’Reilly Hall in UCD yesterday to say chief executive Richie Boucher and governor Pat Molloy were doing a good job to try to restore the only bank to avoid State control to full health.

One shareholder said they should “stop slagging off this bank”, though his case was weakened when he asked the bank for more branded umbrellas. The next speaker said he would need a lot of umbrellas to recoup the €100,000 he lost on the bank’s shares.

Molloy defended the bank’s leadership in the crisis, saying that it had been “exceptional” given what the bank had been through.

Concerns raised by shareholders ranged from the timing of the meeting to the thickness of the bank’s 371-page annual report.

Once again, bankers’ pay was a hot topic as the €831,000 and €349,000 Boucher and Molloy were paid in 2011 were queried.

Asked whether it could recoup bonuses paid to the managers who landed the bank in the mess with heavy property lending, Molloy said the bank couldn’t do this.

Quizzed by Independent TD Shane Ross, a shareholder in the bank, about whether it would pay bonuses in future, Molloy said that he could not say, but that the bank was complying with the Government’s agreements on pay issues.

He referred to last year’s letter setting conditions on the Government’s most recent bailout, saying that it imposed “very severe constraints” on pay but, when asked, he couldn’t say what they were.

There was an embarrassing moment when shareholder Neal Duggan spotted that Molloy incorrectly signed his letter in the 2011 annual report with last year’s date.

The bank was asked when it would pay dividends again with one shareholder remarking that his son believed it was unlikely to happen in his father’s lifetime.

Molloy said dividends were blocked until the end of 2015 or the State was repaid its €1.8 billion preference shares, whichever was earlier, but he would not say when the bank would pay them again.

He told shareholders that they would meet again “in due course” to decide whether the bank should buy the Government bond issued to Irish Bank Resolution Corporation to defer the €3.06 billion cash payment on the Anglo Irish Bank promissory notes, a transaction that worried some shareholders.

Shares in the bank closed up 1.8 per cent at 11.2 cent, just one cent higher than last year’s rights issue price.