SOME 223 of the 836 applications received by the Department of Finance for appointment to the board of the National Asset Management Agency (Nama) passed the first round of short-listing before a panel of 36 applicants was drawn up for selection by the Minister.
Details of the recruitment process for the Nama board were released by the department to The Irish Times under the Freedom of Information (FOI) Act.
Three days before Christmas, Minister for Finance Brian Lenihan announced the appointment of former Revenue Commissioners chairman Frank Daly as chairman of Nama, and named six other appointments to the nine-member board.
These are former manager of Fingal County Council Willie Soffe; accountant Brian McEnery; financial consultant Peter Stewart; former AIG executive Eilish Finan; former Bank of Ireland executive Michael Connolly, and Steven Seelig, a senior adviser at the International Monetary Fund in Washington DC.
Brendan McDonagh, chief executive of Nama, and John Corrigan, chief executive of the National Treasury Management Agency (NTMA), hold the other board positions.
Correspondence from the department shows Mr Daly and Mr Connolly have been appointed initially for five years, Ms Finan, Mr Soffe and Mr McEnery for four years and Mr Stewart for three.
Mr Seelig’s appointment will be for three years from May, when he will join the board after retiring from the IMF.
Eddie Sullivan, a former secretary general of public service management and development at the Department of Finance, and Mary Flynn, head of recruitment services at the Public Appointments Service, oversaw the recruitment process for the department.
They provided a shortlist of 36 names to Mr Lenihan for selection in mid-November 2009.
In a memo to the department, Mr Sullivan and Ms Flynn said “there had been a wide variety of presentations received and to a large degree there was a high calibre pool of applicants, as might be expected due to the seriousness of the issue”.
Details on pay rates for Nama board members were not released.
“The duties and responsibilities of the board in this case are very significantly greater than normal state boards,” Ann Nolan, assistant secretary at the department, wrote to the Minister in one memo. “They are more akin to a large bank. The chairperson, in particular, is likely to have to work very significant hours in the initial period while Nama is being established. Other board members are likely to have significant demands on their time.”
Ms Nolan said the department would propose paying the same rate of expenses to Nama that apply to other NTMA committees. Nama and the NTMA do not fall under the FOI Act.
The department listed the criteria for appointment in one memo. There should be no conflicts of interest, while a senior level of experience in the selected fields of expertise are required, or experience in a senior position as chief executive or senior manager of “a substantial company or public organisation”.
The department said an academic at professor level or consultant/self-employed person who had influence or interaction at senior level in major companies or bodies should be considered.
Appointment criteria included a “useful letter/CV with detailed relevant information”, and individuals should not be working in “any Nama-potential institution”.
The names of applicants were not released to this newspaper. Out of 35 records held by the department regarding the Nama board, 15 were granted in full. The remainder were partly granted or refused.
