ALLIED IRISH Banks has sought Central Bank approval to appoint Peter Rossiter as its permanent chief risk officer, poaching him from the rival State-owned bank Irish Bank Resolution Corporation, formerly Anglo Irish Bank.
Mr Rossiter, formerly a long-serving executive at Citigroup, has worked at Anglo since November 2009, joining 11 months after the bank was nationalised. AIB has been without a permanent chief risk officer since May 2009.
The role has been filled by temporary appointees since then – first by Mary Phibbs, an executive at US restructuring firm Alvarez and Marsal, from October 2010 to May 2011, and then by Stephen Bell, a PricewaterhouseCoopers director.
Mr Bell, whose departure was announced last week, is leaving to join Ulster Bank once the appointment is approved by the regulator.
The Central Bank blocked another of AIB’s preferred candidates for chief risk officer last year as the individual had worked for the bank in the past.
Mr Rossiter has almost 30 years’ experience in international banking and risk management. He worked for Citigroup in Moscow, Istanbul, Brussels and London.
He was the second external appointee installed at Anglo after the appointment of Australian chief executive Mike Aynsley in September 2009.
A spokeswoman for the Central Bank said it could not discuss individual applications for banking roles. Senior banking executive roles must be approved by the Central Bank under its fitness and probity requirements. The timing of the approval of appointments under the rules was “determined on a case-by-case basis”, said the spokeswoman, and there was “no specific timeline in place for applications”.
IBRC had no comment. AIB also declined to comment on the identity of its proposed appointee.
Last month the Central Bank directed AIB to reverse changes to its lines of reporting on credit approvals agreed in September.
AIB was told to revert back to the previous structure introduced by former managing director Colm Doherty where all credit approvals were first signed off by the group chief credit officer, not the heads of the business units.
Since becoming chief risk officer at IBRC, Mr Rossiter has been part of a management team that has taken provisions or posted losses on loan transfers to the National Asset Management Agency totalling €35 billion.
AIB has taken provisions of €14.4 billion on losses on Nama transfers and bad loans in the same period.
The Government is injecting €34.3 billion into IBRC, including €5.4 billion for Irish Nationwide which was acquired by Anglo in July before they were renamed IBRC. A further €20.7 billion of public money is being injected into AIB and its subsidiary EBS. The State has a shareholding of more than 99.8 per cent in AIB.
