Cantillon

Inside the world of business

Bank directors go on the defence

THREE LONG-SERVING directors of the banks were given until the end of this month to respond to the Central Bank’s view that they may be investigated over their pre-crisis roles at the banks, under new fitness and probity rules for bankers.

Irish Life Permanent chief executive Kevin Murphy responded by resigning as a director of its banking company and said that this eliminated him from the Central Bank’s scrutiny.

Fergus Murphy, chief executive of EBS, can argue strongly that he had nothing to do with the implosion of the former building society. His appointment just nine months before the Government bank guarantee of September 2008 strengthens his position.

Murphy’s record at EBS should stand to him. He stopped development lending, the reason for most of EBS’s losses, and nationalisation, shortly after taking over.

The position of Bank of Ireland chief executive Richie Boucher is less assured. After joining from Ulster Bank in 2003, he was head of corporate banking and grew property lending initially through a team led by Gerry Burke.

After Boucher became head of the Irish retail operations in 2006, he continued lending to developers at the direction of chief executive Brian Goggin and the board.

Boucher does have a few cards to play to support his case to stay on as Bank of Ireland chief executive, a job he took over in early 2009.

He could argue that the Central Bank’s tests must assess whether he is fit and proper to keep his current job, that of chief executive.

In that role, he has limited the State’s bailout to €4.2 billion and avoided Government control.

The public support for Boucher from the bank’s new private investors, who hold a 35 per cent stake, will also stand to him.

The Government’s sale of this stake to the investors complicates matters for Minister for Finance Michael Noonan who asked last April (three months before the sale) for all bank directors at the time of the guarantee to resign.

The independent arbitrator appointed by the Central Bank to assess whether Boucher’s pre-crisis role should be investigated will have plenty to weigh up.

'Content providers' content with each other

THERE WAS an air of co-operation and collaboration in the broadcasting sector this week at two early morning media briefings that was, well, almost disappointing.

“I’d heard that RTÉ and the commercial broadcasters always fought like cats in a sack,” said visiting Englishman Jason Brownlee, pioneer of the RadioGauge advertising effectiveness tool. “But I have to say I’ve found no evidence of that round the table today.”

Indeed, Scott Williams, chairman of the Independent Broadcasters of Ireland, described the joint investment by commercial broadcasters and RTÉ Radio in the radio campaign testing system as “probably the most significant collaboration” between the commercial and dual-funded ends of the sector to date.

And while the background to the thorny issue of RTÉ’s share deal advertising system spilled out in a lengthy enforcement decision document published by the Competition Authority on Tuesday, a ceasefire was in operation at an IPG Mediabrands seminar on the future of television yesterday. Geraldine O’Leary, commercial director of RTÉ Television, generously acknowledged the surge in home production coming out of TV3 and was also swift to mention RTÉ’s dual-funded status before Ballymount’s representative, TV3 head of sales Daragh Byrne, could get a chance to do so.

There is plenty to be in a good mood about, after all. AGB Nielsen statistics on average daily television viewing – more than three hours and climbing – are evidence of “a really good news story” for television in Ireland, O’Leary observed.

The industry as a whole was “well future-proofed”, despite the many “TV-is-dead” claims she had read in the press. “Don’t forget that newspapers are our competitors,” she noted.

But is "broadcaster" even the right word to describe RTÉ, TV3, Sky et althese days?

“At RTÉ, our mission is to deliver the best, most creative content to audiences whenever, wherever and however they want it,” said O’Leary.

“That, in our heads, means we are no longer broadcasters. We are content providers.”

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