FOUR SENIOR executives at Aer Lingus were awarded golden parachute exit payments last October on similar terms to the lucrative contracts offered to chief executive Dermot Mannion and chief financial officer Seán Coyle, The Irish Timeshas learned.
It is understood that these contracts were cancelled last week, in line with the decisions of Mr Mannion and Mr Coyle to ask the Aer Lingus board to rescind the terms of the exit packages they were granted by former chairman John Sharman.
It is not clear how much these four contracts would have cost Aer Lingus but sources put it at between €1.5 million and €2 million. They were agreed at a time when Aer Lingus was threatening to outsource hundreds of jobs and was seeking more than €50 million in cost cuts from its staff as well as radical changes to working practices.
It is understood that the potentially lucrative terms were extended to Aer Lingus deputy chief executive Niall Walsh; corporate affairs director Enda Corneille; human resources director Liz White; and Stephen Kavanagh, who heads corporate planning at the airline.
In line with the terms offered to Mr Mannion and Mr Coyle, the quartet would have been entitled to two years’ remuneration if Aer Lingus was acquired and they had to leave the company.
No comment was available from Aer Lingus last night.
The exit contracts caused a furore, with Minister for Transport Noel Dempsey expressing his anger to the board of Aer Lingus.
The decisions by Mr Mannion and Mr Coyle were announced following an emergency board meeting of Aer Lingus last Friday.
The contracts were agreed by Aer Lingus’s remuneration committee but were never placed before the board for approval.
This prompted an angry outburst from trade union leader and Aer Lingus board member David Begg. The Employee Share Ownership Trust also indicated it would support a call to hold a shareholder meeting to debate and vote on the issue.
Ryanair had earlier requested that an extraordinary general meeting of Aer Lingus shareholders be held to consider the new contracts for Mr Mannion and Mr Coyle.
It claimed Aer Lingus had breached company law in the manner in which it agreed the contract terms with its executives.
Separately, Ryanair chief executive Michael O’Leary has written to Aer Lingus chairman Colm Barrington questioning the appointment on January 9th of Laurence Crowley as an independent director.
Mr Crowley is chairman of Realex Payments, which handles Aer Lingus’s payment processing.
