The Opposition is criticising the appointment of AIB Executive Colm Doherty as Managing Director of the bank – saying that the ‘Old Guard’ is still in place

The Government has been claiming victory after AIB agreed the salary of its new Managing Director will be capped at the Government’s limit of half a million euro.

The climbdown was announced this morning after 24 hours of controversy.

A-I-B had suggested that Colm Doherty would take up the position on his current salary of 633,000 euro.

Fine Gael’s Leo Varadkar says the real issue is that the job has been given to an insider

“We were promised that this would be an outside appointment, we were promised that the Minister was in deep with the banks and that we would see regime change” he said.

“The appointment of an insider to this top job isn’t regime change”.

“He’s made a great play on the fact that he’s insisting that the cap be retained, and that’s welcome”.

“But the real issue isn’t whether he gets paid 600,000 or 500,000 – what we should have had here is an outside appoint and secondly we shouldn’t stand over this arrangement where the chairman and the CEO are going to be the same person. That’s really bad corporate governance” he added.