Lenihan asks FG and Labour to suggest candidates for Nama

MINISTER FOR Finance Brian Lenihan has said he has written to Fine Gael leader Enda Kenny and the leader of the Labour Party, Eamon Gilmore, requesting them to suggest suitable candidates to join the board of the National Asset Management Agency (Nama).

Calls for an overhaul of the current system of board appointments have been made by the Opposition in recent weeks as a fall out from the controversy surrounding the board of Fás and concerns over corporate governance in the banking sector.

Mr Lenihan said last night that the Government was addressing issues of corporate governance.

“There are changes on the way in relation to corporate governance in banks . . . we can’t have an automatic succession of chief executives becoming chairmen and we can’t have huge number of directorships being held by bank directors.”

Earlier this week Fine Gael introduced a Public Accounts Transparency Bill into the Dáil, which calls for the qualifications of all nominees to State boards with budgets of more than €1 million to be published and for all nominees for chairman of State boards or as chief executive to appear before the relevant Oireachtas committee for scrutiny.

According to the draft legislation on Nama which was published in July, the agency will have a seven-member board which will be appointed by the Minister of Finance and the National Treasury Management Agency (NTMA), although recent indications suggest that the board will consist of nine members. Board members will be required to have “expertise and experience at a senior level” in one or more of these specific areas: finance and economics; law, valuation and risk management.

Mr Lenihan was speaking as he arrived to present awards to participants of the Institute of Directors’ chartered director programme.

Last year the association introduced a chartered director programme, a set of professional examinations intended to equip participants with “the professional expertise” to act as board directors.