Mike Aynsley, the Anglo Irish Bank chief executive, invited an interesting customer to address the troubled institution’s top brass at a “strategic think-in”, last Saturday afternoon.
Stand up one Denis O’Brien, defender of Sean FitzPatrick, the former Anglo chief executive and chairman.
Mindful of potential fatcat headlines if word of the event leaked out, Aynsley shunned such Anglo-funded establishments as the lavish Ritz Carlton and Tulfarris, opting for the rather reasonable Glendalough Hotel, in Wicklow.
Offering weekend specials of €129 (two nights’ bed and breakfast and one dinner), Glendalough was seen as unlikely to antagonise Irish taxpayers pumping €22 billion and counting into Anglo. For similar reasons, an earnest and busy schedule was set up. Not a round of golf to be had. So boring.
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O’Brien might seem a rather odd choice for such an affair. He has offered both public and private support to FitzPatrick since the latter’s fall from grace.
Aynsley wanted a big Anglo client at the think-in. With the bank reinventing itself, the mission was to find a weighty borrower who was not a developer and not embroiled in all that nasty National Asset Management Agency business. And not, one presumes, a Fermanagh cement maker.
All is explained. Such Anglo customers are, after all, fairly thin on the ground.
Word approaches us, meanwhile, that work has begun at Connaught House, Anglo’s new headquarters, on a refit of the building’s air conditioning.
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The Treasury Holdings-owned building on Burlington Road in Dublin 4 is only a few years old, but it seems that some work is required there ahead of the arrival of Anglo’s top brass. Being from Australia, perhaps Anglo chief executive Mike Aynsley believes that the current warm spell is the norm, and not the freak occurrence that the rest of us, sadly, know it to be.
Still, new air con should at least help with all those tense “clear the air” meetings going on between Tom “The Gunner” Hunersen, the bank’s hard-nosed head of corporate development, and its sweaty developer clients.
Ray looks east to make a packet
Ray Coyle will look at opening a crisp factory in China’s potato-growing Hunan province if the forthcoming launch of Tayto in Shanghai goes according to plan, he says.
“You have to sell them for a year or 18 months before taking the step of building a plant but it’s a great place to do R&D,” said Coyle, who is embarking on the Shanghai adventure with the Chinese businessman Wei Quoinhas.
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Meanwhile, Coyle is at a trade fair in New York this weekend, carrying out research for new rice-based snacks he plans to make in Co Donegal. He will launch a Hunky Dorys balloon this week after “that” advertising campaign featuring buxom female rugby players gave sales a lasting 7% uplift, he says. With 160,000 hits on YouTube and 405,000 hits on the website, he couldn’t care less about controversy around the ads. “We got what we wanted out of it,” he said.
It’s all go, it seems. Can we perhaps suggest a pub launch in China? Tayto and Tsingtao has a certain savour.
Spar chief celebrates union but the brothers are not amused
Family values were to the fore as Tom Noonan of Maxol passed the Ibec presidential chain of office to Leo Crawford, the Spar supremo, on Wednesday.
The monkey suit and guna deas brigade had to run the gauntlet of a Socialist Workers protest and calls of “shame on you” before reaching the sanctuary of the Mansion House Round Room for a tasty chicken caesar salad and sirloin steak with bearnaise sauce.
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For Crawford, the night was a doubly special occasion as he and his wife, Adrienne, celebrated their wedding anniversary. “After 26 years of marriage, it can be hard to make anniversaries exciting and different,” he said. Well, it was different, certainly.
The new Ibec president highlighted another family landmark: his grandfather, also Leo Crawford, became the first president of the Irish Congress of Trade Unions some 50 years ago.
How would the union legend, a founding father of congress, have viewed his grandson’s rise to the throne of stinking capitalism, we mused — but dared not ask the baying crowd outside.
Battle lines have been drawn for what is likely to be a feisty showdown in the High Court this week between the hotelier Hugh O’Regan and Martin Ferris, the receiver Anglo Irish Bank appointed to his Thomas Read Holdings group last year.
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Ferris is suing the operating firm behind the Morrison Hotel, on Dublin’s Ormond Quay, for unpaid rent, claiming €3.7m was due last July. Among the issues in dispute is whether the Morrison can offset money spent on renovations against rent. O’Regan, against whom Anglo secured a €37.4m personal judgment in October, will also question the motivation for Ferris’s appointment.
The case will run from Tuesday. Expect some interesting hotel linen to be aired.