Financial test for Belfast boss

http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/rss/-/1/hi/northern_ireland/8095268.stm

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The Belfast businessman Gerry McGinn is the new chief executive of troubled building society Irish Nationwide.

Mr McGinn, who heads up the Belfast office of stockbrokers Goodbody, replaces Michael Fingleton who ran the society for almost 40 years.

The society which lost almost 250m euro last year has said it can only continue as a going concern with government support.

Mr McGinn was formerly a senior official in the NI Civil Service.

He was permanent secretary of the Department of Education from 2001 before taking up the same role at the Department of Regional Development in 2005. He moved to Goodbody in 2007.

He previously spent 18 years at Bank of Ireland, working in Dublin, Belfast and London.

He is a board member of Invest Northern Ireland.

Under a cap on executive salaries imposed by the Irish government, running Irish Nationwide attracts a salary of 360,000 euro, considerably less than the 1m euro earned last year by Mr Fingleton.

He stepped down in April after handing back a much-criticised bonus.

The society's recently appointed-chairman, Danny Kitchen, who turned down the chief executive's job, has been in charge of the day-to-day business.

Mr McGinn, who is expected to take up his new job shortly, will have the challenge of transferring billions of euro worth of property loans to Ireland's so-called "bad bank", the National Asset Management Agency.