Anne Heraty steps down from CPL in wake of €110m sale windfall

Anne Heraty has stepped down as chief executive of CPL Resources, less than a year after the businesswoman and her husband received €110 million for their shares in the recruitment company as it was taken over by Japanese group Outsourcing.

Ms Heraty, a native of Co Longford, co-founded CPL in 1989 at 29 and became the first female chief executive of an Irish publicly quoted company a decade later when she floated the business. Outsourcing acquired CPL last January for almost €318 million in an all-cash deal.

CPL has named Lorna Conn, who joined the company in 2017, as chief financial officer before being appointed deputy chief executive in April, as Ms Heraty's successor. Ms Heraty's husband, Paul Carroll, stepped down as a director and left CPL after the takeover was completed.

Talented team

“I am immensely proud of how far CPL has come since its foundation and that growth was enabled by the deeply talented and committed team I have been privileged to work with,” said Ms Heraty, who will retain her non-executive role on the global board of Tokyo-based Outsourcing.

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“Lorna has excelled since she joined CPL and together with the executive team will work to evolve and expand the company as it enters a new phase of growth.”

Ms Heraty said the company is “in a very strong position at the moment”, amid strong demand for staff across various sectors of the economy.

A rapid rebound in economic activity has pushed unemployment down to a pandemic low of 6.9 per cent as of last month, compared to a rate of more than 20 per cent a year earlier and a pandemic high of 31 per cent in April 2020, according to the latest jobless figures from the Central Statistics Office.

‘Flexible talent’

CPL, which has 15,000 employees internationally, is much more focused on providing temporary staff, or what it likes to call “flexible talent”, than peers.

Earlier this year, Ms Heraty and Mr Carroll also benefited to the tune of about €100 million from the €150 million-plus sale of the Trinity Care nursing and care homes group in which they bought a 70 per cent stake nine years ago.

Ms Heraty is also a board member of Kingspan, the Dublin-listed insulation group, and Ibec, the business lobby group. She was a non-executive director of Anglo Irish Bank at the time of its collapse, with the now defunct bank landing taxpayers with a €29.3 billion bailout bill.