AIB to meet staff pensions despite deficit

AIB promised to meet all its pension obligations to staff despite the existence of a huge deficit of over 700m in its pension funds.

Outgoing company chairman Lochlann Quinn told yesterday’s agm that the group has always met its obligations to pensioners and would continue to do so.

“We do not have a problem with them. We will meet all out obligations under the pensions plans” he told shareholder Niall Duggan.

Efforts by dissident shareholders, including Niall Murphy, to dent the standing and credibility of AIB Group in the post Rusnak era flopped at yesterday’s annual general meeting.

The final blow was Mr Murphy’s failure to get elected to the board with just over 7% willing to back his candidacy, of which 4% may have been an error by a financial institution which allegedly voted for and against each motion on the agenda.

Many of the questions from shareholders went back over the DIRT scandal and the Ansbacher debacle and the involvement of former AIB chairman, Jim Culliton in Ansbacher.

In the course of the lengthy meeting AIB was accused among other things of hanging 50,000 DIRT depositors out to dry.

Mr Quinn dismissed that allegation pointing out that those who were chased down by the Revenue were depositors who failed to settle with the Revenue in the two year time frame offered at the time.

He flatly rejected claims also that the bank “shamelessly misled” customers over DIRT, while conceding that in some instances employees of the bank took it on themselves to persuade customers to open bogus non resident accounts.

Mr Quinn also rejected further allegations that DIRT victims were “thrown to the wolves and abandoned” by the bank.

Overall the “situation is the vast majority of customers” settled their affairs over the two year period offered by the Revenue at the time of the scandal.

It was those “who decided not to accept that offer” who are now faced with difficulties of their own making, he said.