BELFAST BRIEFING:RESIGNATIONS ARE not the type of announcements most people expect from Stephen Kingon. The chairman of Invest Northern Ireland and the former managing partner of PricewaterhouseCoopers has never been known as a quitter.
In fact his reputation and track record suggest quite the opposite.
So his recent decisions first to step down from the North’s lead economic development agency, Invest NI, ahead of schedule and then to leave the board of Allied Irish Bank has led to some raised eyebrows. Whatever might Kingon be up to? It turns out the newly appointed chairman of ESB-owned Northern Ireland Electricity (NIE) has simply been moving his chess pieces around.
Kingon, who was appointed as a non-executive director of AIB in 2007, decided not to seek re-election because of the changes and restructuring that have and will continue to take place at the bank. He believes there will be a focus on anyone who was appointed as a director of an Irish bank prior to the government’s bank guarantee issued in 2008.
Kingon may not say it aloud but there is a sense that he suspects there will be a clean sweep at AIB when it comes to directors and that he would have gone anyway whether he opted to or not.
When it comes to Invest NI, he appears to have a much simpler motivation for jumping nine months ahead of schedule. Kingon was first appointed chairman of Invest NI in January 2006 and then reappointed in December 2008. Before that he had been a board member of the agency for three years to December 2005.
By anybody’s calculations he has more than served his time with Invest NI.
In light of the fact that Northern Ireland will soon have a new minister for enterprise, he believes it makes sense for him to formally step down as soon as a replacement is found.
“There will be a new programme for government and, running parallel with that, a new economic strategy. Invest NI will also have a new corporate plan. It would be daft if the next chairman of Invest NI were to have no input in producing that,” Kingon says.
He has clearly enjoyed his years with Invest NI and hints that the agency’s next set of annual results will show just how well it has performed in the last 12 months despite difficult global conditions
Regardless of his departure from the agency, his influence on the economic front is unlikely to be diminished. He has had the ear of whichever government has been in power for nearly two decades.
He thinks now more than ever the North has an opportunity to put in place the necessary infrastructure to create a new economic environment but it is going to take guts and determination to do it.
“Rebalancing the Northern Ireland economy is a long-term objective. It could take 20 to 25 years and in the meantime we need to deal with the employment issues that Northern Ireland is currently facing,” he says.
Kingon believes local political leaders need to think carefully about their next economic strategy. A lower rate of corporation tax would certainly help Northern Ireland but on its own it might not be enough.
“We might need other tax varying powers. We need to be realistic in Northern Ireland because, even if we got a lower rate of corporation tax tomorrow, it wouldn’t be the silver bullet.
“We need to make sure that in the current economic situation we match budgets with rhetoric. It is important that the business voice is heard. It’s easy to stand back and knock something but what we need to do now is all got to work together.”
Kingon is particularly worried about the “availability of bank finance”. He says some firms are struggling to secure the right type of credit facilities and the local situation may not be helped by the fact that its four major banks are owned externally – including AIB-owned First Trust.
He believes an urgent debate is needed about whether the likes of Invest NI needs to step into the “micro banking space” to help small to medium sized firms in the North. Kingon says it is vital the flow of credit is restored locally and the Northern Ireland Executive needs to explore fresh options and perhaps even for the first time look at ways to step into the gap in the banking market.
He says the next 24 months are going to be a “difficult” time for Northern Ireland. “We have short-term employment issues to deal with and there is going to be much tighter public expenditure constraints – we need to look at how we can maximise European funding to balance out the shortfall from the London Exchequer. What is essential is that we hold on to what we have in Northern Ireland while creating new opportunities for the future.”
If anything, Kingon appears to intent on working even harder for the North’s economy during the next 12 months than before.
