MANAGEMENT AT State-owned Anglo Irish Bank has signalled to staff that there will be no further job cuts this year beyond the 230 redundancies already announced.
Concerns about their future employment and their terms and conditions have prompted staff to seek union representation, marking the first time a union has been enlisted at Anglo.
Staff at the bank have voted to ask the Irish Bank Officials Association (IBOA) to represent them. An interim staff committee has been set up to begin arranging subscriptions to the union this week.
An existing group representing the bank’s 1,500 staff, known as the Anglo Employee Committee (AEC), has held regular meetings with Anglo’s new management team over recent months to raise staff concerns about the job cuts and the bank’s future plans.
Anglo announced a redundancy programme last November, saying that the bank would seek 230 job cuts initially and a similar number over a longer period, pending a wider review of the business.
Three of the bank’s senior management team told staff in an internal briefing almost two weeks ago that the bank would not cut any further jobs this year.
Staff were briefed by Tom Hunersen, Anglo’s head of corporate development; Aidan Long, head of technology and operations; and Seán Fitzpatrick, head of human resources (who is not related to Anglo’s former chairman).
The AEC is seeking clarification from the bank’s management after Anglo’s incoming chairman Alan Dukes said publicly last Friday that there would be a need for further redundancies later this year.
Sources with knowledge of the bank’s strategy said that Mr Dukes had been working off Anglo’s original plans announced last year.
Staff were also concerned by an internal note circulated last week by the AEC which detailed minutes of comments made by Mr Hunersen at this month’s briefing.
The note claimed that Mr Hunersen had said that Anglo planned to buy back the loans it was transferring into Nama at a significant discount to the price at which they were going in and that Anglo also planned to start trading in high-risk credit default swaps (CDS).
Anglo management sources dismissed the internal staff note as inaccurate, saying that the note misinterpreted his comments.
According to the sources, Mr Hunersen said during the briefing that the Irish bank system, including Anglo, would have to support Nama assets when they were refinanced into the market.
He told the AEC that the bank planned to reduce its post-Nama loan book through syndication and securitisation deals, the sources said. They said that Mr Hunersen had not outlined in the discussion with staff this month any plans to start proprietary trading in CDS – contrary to the note circulated to employees, which was described by the sources as “unhelpful”.
