Maurice Harte

Chairman

Maurice is an experienced business professional with a background in Merchant Banking, Investment Management and Real Estate. He is a Fellow of the Institute of Bankers and a member of the Chartered Institute of Securities and Investments.

Maurice has over 35 years experience at senior level in national and international Investment Banking and Real Estate. He has worked with many leading companies in the areas of his expertise including Hill Samuel Merchant Bankers, Hill Samuel Fagan Investment Management ( Managing Director), AIB Investment Managers ( Managing Director), Treasury Holdings ( Chief Executive) and Taggart Holdings (Chief Executive).

Maurice is currently a director/advisor of Covestone Asset Management, Empeira Limited, Reef Holdings, Bmol Partners and Bluebear Technologies.

A founder member and past Chairman of The Irish Association of Investment Managers, Maurice gained international banking and real estate experience while working with Hill Samuel, AIB Asset Management Group, Treasury Holdings, in countries such as the UK, USA, Europe and Singapore.

Mon O'Driscoll

Partner

Mon has over 25 years' experience in banking and corporate finance. He is a fellow of Chartered Accountants Ireland and has a degree in Economics from University College Dublin.

He spent over 24 years in AIB plc where he headed up the Investment Banking Division. Following the financial crisis he was responsible for managing over 1,600 commercial banking customers in distress covering North Dublin and from the North East to the North West of Ireland. He also managed the reduction in the Bank's structured securities book from 2.1bn to 1.1bn. These assets consisted of CMB's RMB's CLO's CDO's, and bilateral's with various international banks.

He was appointed Head of Investment Banking at AIB in 2005 and was responsible for the key strategic direction of each of the businesses within Investment Banking. His key achievements in this role can be summarised as follows:

• With his team he grew the profits in Investment Banking from 34m in 2004 to 133m in 2007. While profits declined since then due to the global fall in asset values the Investment Banking area never made a loss. The business within the Investment Banking were sold as part of the Banks deleveraging program.
• He led the AIB Corporate Finance team in the flotation of Aer Lingus, were they acted as Joint Sponsor Global Coordinator and Joint Book Runners with UBS, the flotation resulted in the successful fund raising of 470m on both the Dublin and London Markets.
• Under his chairmanship Goodbody experienced strong growth up until 2007. The growth came primarily from Private Clients and Equity Trading. Through his chairmanship of the Compliance Committee, he instilled a very high compliance culture which resulted in few successful miss-selling claims, and in the Equity Trading area he monitored daily the risk profile of the book and took direct responsibility for implementing a dynamic risk profile system to take account of the heightened volatility in the market.
• BZWBK AIB Asset Management was a 50 /50 joint venture between AIB Capital Markets and BZWBK which was set up in 1997, when he took over responsibility it had profits of c. 12m, by 2007 this had reached over 100m. He played a key role in identifying and implementing their distribution channels, which lead to their significant growth in assets under management. He structured the sale of this business to Santander which closed on 1st April 2009 yielding a profit of 171m.
• In AIB Investment Managers:
  • He took over the running of AIBIM soon after it had lost the ARK Life assurance business, which would have accounted for approximately 40% of its assets under management. With tight cost controls AIBIM has made a profit, every year until its sale in 2010.
  • Through enhanced product development AIBIM became Irelands largest Multimanager of 3rd party funds
  • He helped form a strategic alliance with Legal and General Investment Managers to sell and distribute their passive Indexed Management product.
  • Established US office in 2008 and developed a Socially Responsible Investment product
• AIBPPM was AIB's Polish property management company which ran two funds in which there were approximately 750m in commercial real estate assets.
• AIB BNY
  • This was a joint venture with Bank of New York. in the funds administration and custodial area, he represented AIB's interests on the Board.
  • With the rapid growth in the funds industry it became clear that the future of the business was served under the control of BNY
  • In 2006 he orchestrated the sale of our 50% stake for a profit of 50m

1998 - 2005

Managing Director AIB Corporate Finance

He was appointed a Director of AIBCF in 1998 and Managing Director on 2001. My key achievement in AIBCF was to:

Some of the transactions he worked on were as follows:

• Advised on Finance magazine deal of the year 2005, Grafton Groups takeover of Heiton, and on the second placed deal, Barlo's acquisition by Sean Quinn
• Acted on all plc takeovers in 2004 (Gresham, Barlo and Grafton)
• Advise the government on the IPO of Aer Lingus
• Advised VNU on the purchase of Golden Pages
• Advised Superquinn (Ireland's 4th largest supermarket chain) on it sale
• Advised AIB on sale of Allfirst to M&T
• Advised AIB on sale of Allfirst to M&T