Troubled AIB to release annual results

Allied Irish Bank, Ireland’s biggest bank, was today presenting its annual results in Dublin, just two weeks after confirming a massive deficit of more than €866m at an US subsidiary.

The company’s embarrassment over the affair was compounded last night, with reports that the bank had sustained yet another trading loss in the US - because of the activities of a bond trader in New York, who has since left AIB.

The latest setback involved a relatively modest sum of around €11.4m - and, unlike the first affair did not centre around fraud allegations - but it was thought sure to compound the company’s unease.

The earlier development - generated by alleged fictitious trading on the part of foreign exchange dealer John Rusnak at the AIB-owned Allfirst Finance Corporation in Baltimore, Maryland - is expected to lead to AIB's reporting a sizeable cut in its earnings for last year.

Meanwhile, the investigation into just what went wrong in Maryland, spearheaded by top US banker Eugene A Ludwig, is continuing, and will be in the background as analysts probe and examine AIB’s figures.

For their part, the under-pressure management of the parent company have stuck to forecasts of single-digit earnings-per-share growth and insisted that events in the US would not stop their business going forward.

The results will be submitted, though, against a background of persistent signals that AIB are now a takeover target on the international finance front.