FEARS ABOUT FUTURE OF QUINN GLASS AT MEETING OF 1,000 PEOPLE - A crowd of approximately 1,000 people turned out in Ballyconnell, Co Cavan, last night to voice fears over a foreign takeover of the company that used to be Quinn Glass, one of the biggest employers in the region.
Organised by Concerned Irish Citizens (CIC), an organisation that is pro-Seán Quinn, the former billionaire who will emerge from bankruptcy on Friday, the community hall was packed with locals who were unanimous in their belief that the preferred bidder, Spanish company Vidrala, should not be allowed to take over the glass manufacturing company. Quinn Glass, which was rebranded as Encirc last year, employs more than 400 people at its plant in Derrylin, Co Fermanagh, Mr Quinn’s home town. Local residents fear the takeover will result in job losses despite attempted reassurances from Aventas, which took over the Quinn Group four years ago, says the Irish Times. Glass workers had hoped a local takeover could be concluded on the lines of a similar arrangement executed by Quinn Business Retention Company (QBRC) company - comprising former Quinn Group executives and local business figures - which took over the Quinn construction industry supply and packaging businesses before Christmas. A letter from management at QBRC was read out to the meeting, stating that they could not attend because they were still negotiating with the sellers of the glass company.
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STAFF IN LINE FOR AVERAGE PAY-OFFS OF €34,000 EACH AS NAMA TO SLASH JOBS - Staff at NAMA will be in line for redundancy payments of around €34,000 each as the agency slashes job numbers by two-thirds over the next two years. The head of NAMA, Brendan McDonagh, briefed staff on Friday of plans to cut employee numbers from 370 to 290 by the end of this year, and to 125 at the end of 2016. It is understood that the cuts will be done selectively, with NAMA seeking to hold on to some key staff as long as possible. A spokesman for the agency declined to say if the job cuts will be voluntary, but the scale of the of the reduction in staff means some compulsory redundancies are likely. NAMA was set up in 2009 to run for a fixed 10-year period. Staff working at the agency are employed by the National Treasury Management Agency (NTMA) on fixed term contracts and seconded to NAMA. The Irish Independent understands that redundancy packages will include three weeks' pay per year of service, plus two weeks' statutory redundancy per year, although this is capped at €600 a week. Average pay at NAMA is just over €100,000 a year - or €1,900 a week. That means a total redundancy payment of €34,000 for an employee earning the average salary who has been with the agency for five years. The decision to slash staff numbers relatively early in the proposed 10-year life of NAMA follows last summer's decision to accelerate the sell-off of Nama assets in order to have repaid 80% of its original €32 billion of senior debt by the end of 2016. The pick-up in the pace of sales means Nama staff will have fewer assets and fewer debtors to manage.
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EUROPEAN COMMISSION ‘MAY FORCE MORE AUSTERITY ON IRISH STATE’ - Ireland may face years more of damaging budget cuts because of the European Commission’s erroneous way of calculating structural deficits, a leading economist has said. Willem Buiter, Citigroup global chief economist, said Ireland may have to implement unnecessary austerity measures because the European Commission calculated Ireland’s structural deficit using a population estimate taken from the height of the economic crisis, when emigration levels were rampant. “It completely underestimated the elasticity of the Irish labour market,” said Mr Buiter. Over the past two years, the economy has rebounded strongly, which has led to net migration narrowing significantly. Mr Buiter, formerly a member of the Bank of England’s Monetary Policy Committee and a lecturer at Yale University, expected Ireland’s growth rate to be the highest in the EU for the foreseeable future. “I did not think I would see a 5% growth rate in Europe again,” he said in Dublin following Citigroup’s annual meeting with investors says the Irish Examiner. At a broader level, Mr Buiter said the euro zone faces some intractable problems. If, as press reports suggest, the ECB’s proposed quantitative easing would involve national central banks buying up sovereign debt, that could pave the way for the dissolution of the eurozone. Greece in particular, but also Spain, Portugal, Italy, and France needed debt writedowns, and if their national central banks were holding huge amounts of sovereign debt at the time of the writedown, that would make them technically insolvent, said Mr Buiter.
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SELLAFIELD CONSORTIUM TO BE STRIPPED OF CLEAN-UP DEAL - The UK government is poised to relieve an industrial consortium of a lucrative management contract to clean up Sellafield, western Europe's largest nuclear waste site. Nuclear Management Partners, which has run the site for more than six years, was granted a five year extension to its contract in 2013, despite criticism of its performance. People in industry and government told the Financial Times that the contract would be officially terminated today. The Nuclear Decommissioning Authority is expected to takeover Sellafield and manage its clean-up. The consortium, which is responsible for 10,000 staff at the site, is made up of US engineering company, URS, French energy group Areva and Britain's Amec. Sellafield, the home of a former munitions factory, is a sprawling nuclear complex on the coast of Cumbria that has become to symbolise the challenges of dealing with Britain's atomic legacy. In the 1950s its reactors made plutonium for nuclear weapons; it was later the site for the world's first commercial nuclear power station. Today it is home to a huge accumulation of hazardous waste, much of it stored in ageing ponds and silos. The cost of cleaning up and decommissioning the state has been put on £79.1 billion over the next 120 years.
