Russian bond storm; Ireland’s productive workforce; and the DAA’s Army

Ireland finds itself uncomfortably at the centre of the Russian bond default, with the debt at the centre this week of the country’s first foreign default since the Bolshevik Revolution more than a century ago listed in Dublin and sold to investors using bond prospectuses that were approved by the Central Bank of Ireland. Joe Brennan has the details.

On a more upbeat note, data form the CSO says Irish workers are now among the most productive in the world, adding on average €95.76 to the value of the economy for every hour they work. The caveat, of course, is that the figure is highly inflated by the multinational-dominated sectors, writes Eoin Burke-Kennedy. Strip them out, productivity is a more modest but still creditable €51 per hour of work – more in line with peer countries.

In her column, Sarah O’Connor has a less cheerful view of the UK where, she writes, the proportion of young men who are economically inactive (neither working nor looking for work) has climbed steadily from 5 per cent in 2000 to 9 per cent last year, a detail only obscured in overall data by a collapse in the number of stay-at-home young mothers.

Soldiers deployed to aid security checks at Dublin Airport will not be screening passengers, the DAA has said. Instead, they will screen vehicles entering the airfield, freeing up as many as 100 DAA security staff to handle passenger queues, writes Barry O’Halloran, who has confirmed that DAA will have to pay for any Army assistance.

Meanwhile, a spike in Covid cases among staff forced Aer Lingus to cancel another six flights yesterday, including two transatlantic services. Barry writes that the latest cancellations come after followed two days when the Irish carrier had to axe services over Covid outbreaks, airport bottlenecks and air traffic controllers’ strikes. Ryanair warns European traffic controllers’ industrial action will likely cause problems throughout the summer season.

Auditing firm EY, one of the so-called Big Four, has agreed to a record $100 million (€95 million) settlement with the US securities regulator over claims that dozens of its employees cheated on an ethics exam and that it misled investigators. Not unreasonably, the regulator said: “It’s simply outrageous that the very professionals responsible for catching cheating by clients cheated on ethics exams of all things.”

Department of Finance officials defended the decision to sell a 5 per cent stake in AIB this week even though the shares are languishing at close to half the price of the bank’s initial public offering price five years ago and much the same against the share’s current intrinsic value. Joe Brennan reports.

Joe also writes that the National Asset Management Agency has completed a ¤250 million transfer to the exchequer, bringing the total of surplus cash it has paid over to date to ¤3.25 billion. It expects to pay over another quarter billion euro this year and €4.5 billion in total by the time it finishes its work over the next few years.

A new international survey has placed Dublin in the top 50 most expensive cities in which to live and work – well behind Hong, Kong and the major Swiss cities but ahead of Rome and Luxembourg, with the cost of securing private rented accommodation a key issue. Ian Curran has the details.

Two Israeli-Canadian brothers and two Irish men were accused of being behind an “enormous fraud” in which a Dublin-registered company was used to cheat investors out of some €4 million in an electronic trading scam, the High Court has heard.

In Commercial Property, Ronald Quinlan writes that industrial and logistics specialist Rohan Holdings is understood to have secured more than €17 million from the forward sale of Contrail House, a new warehouse and office unit it is developing at Dublin AirPort Logistics Park from US pharmaceutical packaging and courier company, Yourway.

And Teepee Developments, the private Irish developer headed up by town planner Tom Philips, has got about €11.5 million from the sale of a newly completed aparthotel on Bride Street near Dublin city centre. The Staycity Dublin Castle, as it is known, has been acquired by a fund managed by BNP Paribas Real Estate Investment Managers.

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