EBS staff to miss out on €5,000 Christmas bonus

STAFF AT the EBS have been told they will not receive an annual Christmas bonus of up to €5,000 per person as the Government’s bailout deal with Allied Irish Banks, the building society’s new owner, prohibits bonus payments.

The former building society has instead offered staff an interest-free loan of up to two years to the equivalent value of the bonuses.

Colm Quinlan of the Unite trade union said that it would immediately ballot EBS staff for strike action before Christmas. He said the yearly payment was “effectively a form of payroll savings scheme” and not a bonus, and that the average earnings of the people affected was €30,000.

“We have been shocked by some of the callous disregard shown to staff across the banking sector . . . but this goes straight to number one in the chart of cynical acts. Even Scrooge would not have stooped as low as this.”

EBS has paid a bonus amounting to a month’s pay to 370 staff below management level at Christmas every year for more than 30 years, said a spokesman for the nationalised institution.

The State is injecting €2.4 billion into EBS and a further €18.4 billion into AIB, which acquired the former building society in July. The Government insisted in its agreement with AIB that no bonuses be paid.

The bonuses had to be paid under the employees’ contractual arrangements with EBS, said its spokesman. He confirmed that the payments had been made over the three years since the introduction of the bank guarantee.

The spokesman said that the Christmas bonus – known within EBS as the “13th month” payment – was fully disclosed to the Department of Finance and the Central Bank over the past three years.

This year’s bonuses would have cost EBS €1.3million and were due to be paid into staff bank accounts tomorrow but employees were told earlier this week that payments were not being made.

The EBS spokesman said that, on the basis that staff may have been expecting this year’s bonus and spent the money in advance, two or three-year interest-free loans were being offered to staff. The loans would be repaid directly from their pay packets, he said.

Bonuses were prohibited under the “placing agreement” reached between the Government and AIB in July under which a further €13 billion was injected into the enlarged nationalised bank comprising AIB and EBS.