Richard Keatinge:RICHARD KEATINGE, who died on February 29th aged 60, was one of the foremost financiers in a generation of investment bankers closely involved in the expansion and modernisation of Irish commerce as the economic boom took hold and long before it too.
Best known for his work as managing director of IBI Corporate Finance in the 1990s, he was a perspicacious deal-maker whose interventions in big corporate transactions were often pivotal. Many believed he was treated very unfairly when he lost a senior job at IBI's parent Bank of Ireland in 1990 over troubles he inherited in its British unit. The experience quashed his chance of becoming chief executive of the bank, but it was seen as a mark of his calibre that he was invited to run IBI only three years later.
A driven man who liked to be in charge, he was chairman of builders' merchants company Heiton when it was bought by Grafton Group in 2005 for €353 million. At a very young age, he was business editor of The Irish Times.
Richard Keatinge was born in 1947 in Kenya. His father Richard Herbert Keatinge, who was from Co Cork, was resident magistrate of Mombasa. His mother Mary (née Leonard) was born in South Africa to a family which had its origins in Yorkshire.
He studied at Trinity College Dublin, graduating in 1969 with a BA in economics and politics. In 1970 he married Athene Clist, whom he had met at Trinity.
He entered the world of business journalism directly from college when he was accepted onto the graduate programme at Reuters in London. It was only by chance when he came across a copy of The Irish Times in a tube station in 1971 that he learned of a vacancy for deputy business editor. He was duly appointed.
He found time amid busy daily newspaper work to study for a Masters in Business Administration at University College Dublin, graduating as the outstanding student of his MBA year with the Sir Charles Harvey award in 1975. He become business editor that year and his stewardship of the financial pages was marked by an increasingly analytical approach to business news.
It was from that post that he launched his business career when he was headhunted in 1978 by the financier Richard Hooper, then chief of IBI. Ambitious, deeply competitive and possessed of a questioning intellect, he honed his skills at IBI for five years before his promotion in 1983 to the upper echelons of Bank of Ireland. His second period with IBI, from 1993 until 2000, was marked by new deal-making opportunities as business activity increased in line with Ireland's economic recovery.
He threw himself into this work with zeal. In 1997, for example, he advised Bank of Ireland on its £600 million sterling acquisition of Bristol & West Building Society and on Avonmore's €482.5 million merger with Waterford Foods. Among numerous other transactions, he also advised on Ryanair's stock market flotation.
"He loved doing the deals," said a former colleague.
He is survived by his wife Athene, sons Benjamin and Douglas, daughter Rebecca, brother Bill, and sisters Liza and Diana.
Richard Arthur Davis Keatinge: born August 30th, 1947; died February 29th, 2008 .