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PRESIDENT MICHAEL D Higgins has signed the Irish Bank Resolution Corporation Bill 2013 this morning at Áras an Uachtaráin.
The Bill, which was voted on by TDs in an emergency late-sitting last night moves to immediately liquidate the Irish Bank Resolution Corporation (IBRC), the combined former Anglo Irish Bank and Irish Nationwide.
Finance Minister Michael Noonan said yesterday that it was necessary to approve the legislation immediately as the plan to scrap IBRC’s promissory notes was leaked to foreign media.
In the Dáil, the bill was approved at 3am with 113 votes to 35. It then went a vote in the Seanad, where it was passed by 38 votes to six.
President Higgins interrupted his official visit to Rome to return home so that he would be available to sign the Bill into law. He will be returning to Italy later this morning to complete his programme of engagements.
The legislation will now see the special liquidator, KPMG, start to sell off all of IBRC’s assets and liabilities. The bulk of this will go to NAMA, which will act as a kind of purchaser ‘of last resort’ if no other parties wish to buy each asset.
There are concerns about IBRC’s workforce of 800 people which the Bill will essentially lay off, though Finance Minister Michael Noonan said last night that he understood most staff would be immediately rehired by the liquidators, or by NAMA when it takes on IBRC’s assets.
The intention of this bill is that the promissory notes – which currently require an annual repayment of €3.06 billion, due at the end of March – will be replaced with NAMA-issued bonds, which are covered by a government guarantee.
The repayment of the promissory notes has been a hot topic recently with the government in discussions with the European Central Bank (ECB) to work out a deal. ECB approval for last night’s legislation could come later today when its governing board meets in Frankfurt.
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well , i hate to say it but how big would our collective blinkers be if it wasn’t for anon?
I love how easily people seem to blindly accept these faceless “organisations” as the saviours of “free speech”
How exactly does anonymous brand of censorship differ to SOPA censorship.
Ever Wonder who is really behind Anon & Wikileaks ?
Trust no one
an apt name
Don’t talk about what you don’t know.
In response to an “apparent” cyber attack on interpol they arrested 25 people they suspected… …of using computers? of having an IT degree? of saying something out of line on the journal.ie forums? Its all so paper thin it could be a plot line from CSI! And yet interpols exec direc thinks it was a successful crack down on cyber crime. What a nice little work of fiction we are being force fed.
“i fought the law and the law won!” Bobby Fuller
nothing but respect for anonymous, at the very least they have an excellent sense of humour. they will never be stopped
I thought these guys all used IP address blockers, etc. How good are they if they get caught so easily?
Who said it was easy? They are known to use zombie machines etc but the folks chasing them can be just as good, and obviously are.
Or how good are they that the managed to hack INTERPOL.
Comitting crime is easy. Evading capture is the hard part.
I’m not an IT head, but from all I’ve read hacking is as easy as picking a car lock…something I also have no skill or training in.
@Jason I doubt they hacked anyone, I’m assuming it was another DDoS attack like all the others.
These ‘cyber-attackers’ are just fools running LOIC pointed at an IP address. Hardly hackers.
Script Kids? Yeah, they make up most of Anonymous.
Which is a shame really, considering that they don’t quite understand what they are getting themselves into.
LulzSec & Anon and many other groups have dozens of guides on how to ghost yourself online. If the kids don’t want to read, who cares? I certainly don’t.
Ghosting isn’t entirely foolproof, though. Even though there are networking programs that completely exclude your mahcine from the WWW.
have your say