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Ireland's political and cultural magazine
10September/October 2015
mortgage he personally authorised for
former finance minister and then EU
commissioner, Charlie McCreevy, in
notwithstanding terms of refer-
ence obliging the Inquiry to examine
the role of politicians in the banking
collapse.
McCreevy received the loan to allow
him to obtain a -year mortgage to
purchase a property at the K Club in
Straffan just before the Ryder Cup was
held at the luxury Kildare course.
Given that McCreevy had a mansion
built for him a few miles down the road
by Sean Dunne in the s, for an
undisclosed amount, it seems a little
extravagant even by the standards of
the time to seek a % loan on the
basis of “minimum paperwork”. It also
happened to make a nonsense of the
rules of the building society which did
not permit % mortgages and which
had valued the apartment at a mere
€.m.
At a hearing of the banking inquiry in
early July, McCreevy was none too
pleased when he was pressed by Labour
senator Susan O’Keefe over the fast-
tracked €.m loan from INBS.
“I don’t know if this comes within the
remit of the committee”, he com-
plained. “I was a bank customer”. He
said that he applied for and received the
loan in , “...a long time after I was
minister for finance. I applied for a loan
in the normal way and gave normal
documentation and it was nothing to do
with my time in finance or anything
else”.
He was forced to withdraw his claim
that the Senator had “sneakily” thrown
in an allegation concerning the contro-
versial loan and instead described her
question as an “innuendo”.
The terse exchange was in tune with
McCreevy’s refusal to accept that there
was any property bubble, or at least any
during his term in finance between
T
HE recent appearance of
Michael Fingleton at the bank-
ing inquiry served only to
reinforce the widespread view
that the Oireachtas hearings
have done little to elucidate the real
causes of the Irish financial collapse.
The former head of Irish Nationwide
Building Society accused everyone else
but himself and his poor and self-serv-
ing stewardship of the institution for its
failure and the matter of the €.bn it
has cost the Irish people.
There was much talk of Fingers’
€m pension pot (which he managed
and accumulated over decades of
shrewd investments on his own behalf),
his €m bonus, which he once prom-
ised to repay or donate to charity but
never did, and the €, watch he
received on retirement in April
just months after the Society folded
under the weight of its billions in bad
loans.
What would have been more interest-
ing would have been an examination by
the Committee of Inquiry of his rela-
tionships with the developers whose
profligate borrowing from INBS con-
tributed directly to the scale of the Irish
collapse, the largest of any developed
country in post-war history, and with
the politicians who let it happen on
their watch.
Presumably for legal reasons, Fingle-
ton was not asked about a €.m
The axis of developers, bankers and politicians is not being adequately probed by Banking
Inquiry or media. By Frank Connolly
Fingering McCreevy, Dunne
and Mulryan
NEWS
September/October 2015 11
reported £m.
Two years later the Isle of Man based
Kulio (IOM) was listed as owner of the
PGS building while Hibernian Capital,
of which Fingleton junior was sole
director, was named as its landlord on
planning application documents.
The property was leased by Kia
Motors in for fifteen years.
The previous year, the father and son
hit the headlines when it emerged that
Fingleton senior had transferred a sum
of €, to Michael junior’s
London account from two accounts in
Montenegro in Eastern Europe not long
after he was hit for a €.m debt
order from Ulster Bank.
During bankruptcy proceedings in
the US in December , Dunne
named Fingleton junior as a key player
in a deal involving his wife’s company,
Mountbrook USA, and Kulio Ltd in
which he claimed to have been paid an
agent’s fee of €,.
Another favourite customer of the
Fingleton’s one man banking opera-
tion, Sean Mulryan, also gave evidence
in July and confirmed his status as a
senior member of the elite political and
banking circle. He described McCreevy
as “a life-long friend” who shared his
interest in horses; as was his successor
in finance and later Taoiseach, Brian
Cowen.
Three weeks earlier, on nd July,
during his first of two appearances at
the inquiry, Cowen was asked whether
he had held discussions with any prop-
erty developers before giving his
evidence and he name dropped Mul-
ryan as one he had met casually at a
‘social occasion’ just four days
previously.
What he did not mention was that the
social occasion was the latest lavish
and , or that he had done
anything wrong in his handling of the
economy over those years.
The K Club was also the location of
another apartment where Sean Dunne
had moved his selection of paintings
and other works of art from his former
Shrewsbury Road home until they were
seized last year by court official
assignee, Chris Lehane, as part of the
developer’s bankruptcy process.
Among the ‘treasures’ found in the
vacant apartment was none other than
a portrait by Tom Byrne of Dunne’s
favourite lender, Michael Fingleton. At
the time of the raid, Dunne denied own-
ership of the K Club property which he
said was held in an Isle of Man-regis-
tered trust called Traviata.
A painting by Dunne’s sister, Anne
Donnelly, of the famous yacht the
Christina O aboard which Dunne and
his new wife, Gayle Killilea, celebrated
their €.m wedding was also found
among the art works.
Fingleton, along with a host of other
property and political luminaries,
attended the lavish wedding in .
In , it emerged that Fingleton’s
son, Michael junior, a former INBS
manager, was the landlord of a £m
(€m) office block in England previ-
ously owned by Dunne. Dunne bought
the property PGS Court in Waltham on
Thames in Surrey for £.m in
but was forced to sell it in for a
bash at Mulryan’s th-Century Arde-
node Stud in Ballymore Eustace where
the former finance minister and Taoi-
seach was spotted wining and dining
with a couple of hundred guests includ-
ing Malaysian businessmen flown
in for a weekend of entertainment at
the developer’s expense.
The three day soiree included a visit
to the Guinness Storehouse and a day at
the races and the Irish Derby for his
visitors, before they were fed and
watered at the stud by Rachel Allen and
entertained by Riverdance on the warm
Sunday afternoon.
During his evidence, Mulryan con-
firmed that Sean FitzPatrick had
attended similar bashes at his home
during the good days but denied that
this had anything to do with his bank-
ing arrangements with Anglo.
Cowen used similar language when
he denied the crisis in Anglo Irish was
mentioned during his golf outing with
FitzPatrick in July or at a previ-
ous function at the bank earlier that
year.
He also forgot to mention a meeting
in FitzPatrick’s home before the golf
round at Druid’s Glen which another
witness and influential man about town,
Gary McGann, did recall.
Mulryan said that he should not have
concentrated his borrowing on Irish
lenders but then inadvertently revealed
that he could hardly have done other-
wise as they were providing him with
credit and cash at rates he simply could
not have obtained from any responsible
financial institution abroad.
Yet we are expected to believe that
these attractive rates and access to bil-
lions in credit had nothing to do with
the personal relationships built up over
the years with politicians and bankers. •
McCreevy had
a mansion
built for him
by Sean Dunne
in the 1990s
and got a
107% loan
on the basis
of “minimum
paperwork”
from Fingers
for a K Club
property just
down the road
“
