Can't make egm without breaking some eggs

IT TOOK just a few cracking moments and a strong throwing arm to bring about the most puntastic scramble in the history of Irish banking, writes MIRIAM LORD

Apologies in advance. But in these dark times, we must keep the sunny side up. Splat! Splosh! A brace of eggs whizzed past the ears of startled bankers and hit the backdrop beyond. One clipped a microphone mid-flight, spattering an eggy reprimand down the chairman’s sleeve.

Gary Keogh resorted to a hen’s egg yesterday for one simple reason – thanks to the AIB, he doesn’t have a nest-egg to throw. So if one must lob comestibles at the top table during the egm of the bank which has gambled away your rainy day reserves, eggs would seem an appropriate choice. Egm? Yes missus, that would be an Eggstraordinary General Meeting.

In this case, the bank in question was AIB, but most of our big financial institutions are in the firing line for their profligacy and hubris over the last few years. Egg and blue chips anyone?

Puns are not much consolation to those people who worked hard down through the years, putting money by for the future. They were the smart ones, the thrifty ones, and yes, the lucky ones. Why shouldn’t they have invested their money? There’s no safer bet than the banks, they were told by the experts.

But share prices collapsed like a soufflé. The results have been devastating for many small investors.

Even the strutting roosters of high finance have suffered. There is no doubting their regret – there was a lot of sincere regret from the top table yesterday – at what has happened. They have had to endure ruffled feathers, what with their reputations in shreds and the cuts to their massive salaries which have now left them with marginally less massive salaries.

“We drank too deeply from the national cup, I suppose, of confidence,” sighed Dermot Gleeson. It’s just as well that Mr Keogh and his little brown paper bag had been removed from the hall by then, otherwise Dermot might have found himself drinking deeply from an egg-in-a-cup of comeuppance.

The stories are sadly familiar now. They were retold at the recent egm of the Bank of Ireland, and again yesterday. Provision put aside for nursing homes, gone. Funding for care, gone. Income in old age, gone. Dividends depended upon, gone. Hard earned money, gone.

Shareholder Susan Kelly summed up the mood of despair: “Have you any understanding or comprehension, as a board, of the pain you’ve caused? The pain I can tell you is real; it’s unbelievable, it’s breathtaking and life-taking in some circumstances. I hope you, the board, will carry the burden of this pain, for the rest of your life, that you have inflicted on . . . us.”

Mind you, she wasn’t addressing all the directors. It’s amazing how, when things are going well, a company board has to stretch the full width of a room to accommodate the suits. There were only five on the platform yesterday, including the formidable Gleeson, who knows how to handle a crowd.

Michael Riordan demanded to know the whereabouts of the rest of the directors. Can they not sit at the top table? They might end up getting hit by an egg, sniffed Dermot, looking at his jacket.

So where were they? In the front row, top right, sat a quiet line of men in suits. What stood out were the gleaming white shirts, the cufflinks and the shoes. It was the shoes that really gave them away, a long dark gleam of leather.

In the afternoon, these other directors had to stand up and identify themselves. Some shareholders shouted that they should parade down the centre of the hall.

A few speakers rambled on, determined to have their say. There was a lot of talk about letting off steam. Gleeson was charm itself, at pains to be fair, ignoring the insults and glacial tones. Most of the speakers were calm and commendably measured, given the depth of their anger.

But the reality yesterday was that words are all they have. Ordinary shareholders may have come in search of answers and some hope of restitution, but the best they could do was take out their frustration on the banking bosses. And in the case of Gary Keogh, a recently retired grandfather of five from Blackrock, that frustration and anger led him to fire a couple of couple of eggs at the platform. He said afterwards he’d never done anything like that before, but “there’s always a first time”.

When he heard the chairman tell an angry shareholder to sit down, he says he saw red and let fly. To his disappointment, he narrowly missed Eugene Sheehy, but scored an indirect hit on the chairman who should have brought a frying pan along with his script.

The same Mr Sheehy was looking very tanned and fit, despite having protested he would “rather die” than raise equity. Outside in the atrium, we peered up to the offices of the top brass to see if the balcony railing had been set higher following the chief executive’s rather dramatic promise. It was still at chest height. Eugene must have changed his mind about ending it all when that first tranche of government money came in.

Sixty-six-year-old Mr Keogh was some distance from the platform when he struck with his long range eggs. A medical officer monitored proceedings from the back of the hall. The AIB might have been better sending in a chef. The nasty marks on the backdrop were removed during the lunch break. Time to clean up and move on.

If only it were so easy for the small shareholders. Nest-eggs are far messier to clean up when they hit the floor.