11/09 The front pages

‘Forced sale of Polish bank boosts AIB cash by €2.5bn’ is the headline on the front page of today’s Irish Times, detailing how the bank has managed to raise a third of the €7.4 billion required to avoid majority State ownership.

The paper tell us that Spain’s largest bank, Santander, bought AIB’s 70 per cent stake in Bank Zachodni, the third largest bank in Poland, for €2.9 billion and the bank’s share in a Polish asset management firm for €150 million.

The sale boosted AIB’s capital by €2.5 billion and the bank now have to raise another €4.9 billion to reach the Financial Regulator’s capital target by the end of 2010.

Alongside a big picture of Wayne and Coleen Rooney in the wake of damaging revelations about Wayne’s private life, the Irish Independent lead with the headline ‘Closure threat to builders who owe €300m’.

According to a report, twelve developers have been threatened with being put out of business for failing to co-operate with the National Asset Management Agency (NAMA).

NAMA is preparing to offload €500 million worth of property loans in the next few weeks and is taking a hard-line with the twelve developers who have failed to pay back over €300 million worth of property loans between them.

On the ninth anniversary of 9/11 attacks, US president Barack Obama is pleading for tolerance amid the controversy that has arisen over the plans of a Florida pastor to stage a public burning of the Quran.

‘Burning Issue’ is the lead headline in this morning’s Irish Examiner, accompanying a massive picture which shows Pakistani lawyers burning an American flag in protest in Multan to denounce the plans of Terry Jones to burn the Quran in public. Jones was originally planning to burn the Quran in protest at proposed plans to build an Islamic centre near Ground Zero in New York.

Obama has pleaded for calm, saying: “We have to make sure that we don’t start turning on each other.”

“We may call that god different names, but we remain one nation. And, you know, as somebody who, you know, relies heavily on my Christian faith in my job, I understand, you know, the passions that religious faith can raise,” he added.