Joan Burton (Dublin West, Labour)

Does the Minister not appreciate that there is a clear conflict of interest between a director's mandate under company law to act at all times in the interests of the shareholders and their public interest mandate which the Minister has outlined as assisting the banks to return to a more stable situation?

How much money are these directors to be paid and who will pick up the tab? Are they being paid by the banks and will that compromise their independence rather fundamentally? Will these directors have a mandate to ask the board to fire non-performing directors and non-performing chief executives who got the banks into the kind of trouble they are now in? In the public interest will these directors ask about the bonus culture in banks? I heard the chief executive of Anglo-Irish Bank, whose shares yesterday were 33 cent, boasting in an RTE interview that he was taking a pay cut, which included bonuses, from about €3 million to half of that amount, €1.5 million. What planet is that man living on and is he planning, as was implicit in his answer, to pay himself and his staff bonuses? I do not think any of them earned salaries approaching €1.5 million, for tax avoidance reasons, if for no other reason. I ask the Minister to comment.

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