Central Bank governor gifts €63k of his salary to State

The governor of the Central Bank, Patrick Honohan, has gifted €63,324 of his €276,324 salary to the State, it was revealed in its annual report.

The deputy governor, Matthew Elderfield, was actually the highest paid member of staff last year. He earned a salary of €340k for the year.

Mr Elderfield announced last month that he would be leaving the Central Bank in October. It was officially confirmed yesterday that he would be taking up a position with Lloyd’s Bank in the UK as head of regulation. Mr Elderfield has waived a €100k bonus that he was due this year.

In a press briefing yesterday, Mr Honohan declined to comment on whether senior executives of the Irish domestic banks should follow his example and hand back some of their salaries to the minister for finance.

He said it was a complex issue, with Irish bank pay levels comparing favourably with some other jurisdictions and not so favourably with others.

Overall, the Central Bank made a profit of €1.4bn for last year compared with €1.2bn the previous year. The bank distributed €1.1bn to its main shareholder, the Government. Interest income in 2012 decreased by €1.07bn to €2.6bn compared with the previous year.

The decrease in interest income was attributed on the significantly lower amount of lending that the Central Bank did through the Eurosystem’s monetary policy operations, which fell to €758m in last year compared with €1.34bn the previous year. Moreover, lending through the emergency liquidity assistance programme was €1.1bn last year compared with €1.63bn the previous year. However, interest expenses also fell by a combined amount of €837.2m.

The Central Bank’s balance sheet was €137.5bn at the December 31, which was a decrease of €38.7bn from the previous year. The drop reflected the lower levels of Eurosystem and emergency liquidity assistance activity.

The bank employed 1,394 staff at the end of last year, with 293.5 working on Central Bank related functions; 622 were assigned to regulatory areas and 478.5 were in operations.

It is scheduled to leave its Dame Street headquarters and move to the former Anglo Irish Bank building on Dublin’s docklands by the end of 2015.