Number of staff seeking to leave Anglo exceeds 230 cuts sought

THE NUMBER of employees seeking to leave Anglo Irish Bank under the bank’s voluntary redundancy programme exceeded the 230 job cuts sought as the programme closed to staff yesterday.

The State-owned bank has told staff it will not allow all employees who have applied to leave unless there is “over-capacity” in the area in which they work. The bank is identifying the divisions where there is “surplus capacity” and can reduce staff numbers in line with the reduction in business.

It is understood that a number of staff had sought to leave the bank and had secured jobs elsewhere in the belief that all employees who sought the redundancy package would be accepted.

However, senior sources within Anglo have indicated that the bank did not formally tell staff that all applicants would be accepted.

Staff are expected to be told over the coming weeks whether they have been approved to leave.

Anglo unveiled the redundancy plan last November, saying it would seek 230 job cuts initially and a similar number of redundancies over the next two years as it assessed its staffing needs under a restructuring of the business into a good bank-bad bank operation.

In the first wave of cuts, the bank is seeking 110 job cuts within its Irish operations, 95 in Britain and 25 in the US and Europe.

The bank is not expected to be able to determine its staffing requirements until the European Commission approves its restructuring plan, which was submitted to Brussels last November.

Under that plan, Anglo’s senior management, led by chief executive Mike Aynsley, will seek to split the bank into a good bank and bad or “asset run-down” division to recoup impaired loans over time.

The split will follow the transfer of €28 billion in development and associated loans from the bank to the National Asset Management Agency (Nama) this year.

Anglo’s corporate finance and investment banking advisers have concluded that winding up the bank over the medium to long term could cost the State close to €30 billion. Mr Aynsley has said privately that a liquidation of the bank would lead to “an incineration of taxpayers’ money”.

In a liquidation, the bank was advised that the State would have to fund the wind-down, which would include meeting the cost of some €20 billion in bonds that the bank would forgo.