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CRH boss in €19m share sale and AIB’s record profits

The best news, analysis and comment from The Irish Times business desk

CRH chief executive Albert Manifold, who is selling shares in the business worth €19 million. Photograph: NYSE

Dominic Coyle's face
Dominic Coyle
Thu Mar 7 2024 - 06:39

CRH boss Albert Manifold has given notice that he intends selling $20.8 million (€19 million) worth of shares in the company, writes Barry Whyte, with the company’s chief financial officer planning a more modest transaction. The executives are obliged to give advance notice of their intentions under New York Stock Exchange rules.

Shares in AIB jumped more than 5 per cent to climb above its 2017 IPO price for the first time in over five years as the bank reported what chief executive Colin Hunt said was the strongest financial performance in its history on the back of higher ECB interest rates and apathetic savers. The bank said it plans to buy back a further €1 billion of its shares from the State. Joe Brennan reports.

Ryanair boss Michael O’Leary and Minister for Transport Eamon Ryan will hold their first one-to-one meeting today after two weeks of heated debate over the passenger cap at Dublin Airport, with the airline boss yesterday alleging that the Minister who says he cannot get directly involved in the planning process has done so before.

Former PTSB chief executive David Guinane told a Central Bank inquiry that he feels scapegoated as the only individual being subjected to an inquiry relating to the industry-wide tracker mortgage issue, especially when it involves events that took place 15 years ago. Joe Brennan was tuned in.

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Karlin Lillington argues that Apple’s €1.8 billion fine, imposed by the European Commission this week, has been a long time coming but says we should not underestimate its importance as a broader symbol of a serious stepping-up of EU regulatory aggression and a final nail in the coffin of tech sector self-regulation which never delivered except for the companies themselves.

UK chancellor Jeremy Hunt unveiled a budget with few surprises but one that signalled the Conservative government has switched to pre-election mode. It failed, however to deliver the income tax cuts Conservative MPs had hoped for though, Mark Paul reports, it did steal one of the opposition Labour Party’s flagship fiscal policies by abolishing a system of tax breaks for “non-doms”.

Declan Ganley, the chief executive of Rivada Networks, has asked a court in New York to declare that a multimillion dollar debt judgment has been satisfied by the handing over of Rivada shares, the value of which “well exceeds the amount of the default judgment”. Failing that, Barry Whyte reports, the businessman has asked the judge to call an evidentiary hearing on the value of the assets so far turned over.

The Central Bank has published a consultation paper on plans for a beefed-up consumer protection code which, among other things, addresses digital financial services, the sale of unregulated products by regulated financial service providers and the treatment of vulnerable customers.

In Technology and Innovation, Chris Horn expresses concern at Government plans to ditch the Science Foundation Ireland brand carefully nurtured and built up over the past quarter century.

And Ciara O’Brien investigates what the EU’s new Digital Markets Act, which took effect yesterday, actually means for consumers.

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