Whistleblower auctioneer Gabriel Dooley was manoeuvred out of €4m as Bray Council benefited from land sale. By Frank Connolly A prominent auctioneer in county Wicklow has made serious allegations against politicians and public officials over their dealings with property developers Sean Mulryan and Sean Dunne over many years. Gabriel Dooley has emerged as a whistleblower who has threatened to expose the controversial backdrop to multi-billion property deals in the county since the 1990s which helped to make Mulryan and Dunne among Ireland’s richest men before the financial, property and banking collapse of recent years. At the core of his complaints, some of which were aired at a recent meeting of Wicklow County Council – prompting a walkout by both then Cathaoirleach, Jimmy O’Shaughnessy, and the acting county manager, Brian Doyle, – is a claim that he was done out of some €4 million owed to him by Mulryan in connection with the unsuccessful development of a site in Bray town centre. The two-acre site controlled by Mulryan vehicle, Florentine Properties Ltd (FPL), was sold to Bray Town Council for €1.95 million last year after a planning permission for both to co-develop an 80,000 sq ft retail centre, 85 apartments and 500 underground car spaces, for which planning permission was granted in 2007, was not pursued. Dooley, who had a significant stake in FPL, spent some 15 years on the assembly of the lands for Mulryan’s company which eventually acquired 62% of the town-centre site, with the council owning the remainder. As the joint venture plan came to fruition in 2005, Dooley was offered €5 million for his shares in the company with a down-payment of €1 million and the balance to be paid on completion of the shopping centre or on disposal of the lands. While the property collapse put paid to the plans of Mulryan and the Council, it was the manner in which ownership of the property was subsequently transferred to Bray Town Council that has prompted a litany of complaints by Dooley. Among them is a demand for an investigation into whether a decision last year to re-zone some 30 acres controlled by Mulryan at the massive Charlesland development in Greystones from employment to residential use, inflating its value from some €80,000 per acre to €1million an acre, was connected to the Bray deal. The decision to increase the residential component to accommodate an additional 350 houses at Charlesland was made on the advice of senior officials and with the support of councillors in the area. Dooley told Village that FF leader on the council and chairman of the planning committee, Councillor Pat Vance told him the two were connected. Vance has denied this. The Charlesland scheme of 1800 houses and apartments was developed in the mid-2000s by Zapi Ltd, a joint venture between Mulryan and Dunne. Dooley has also asked whether the recent return to Mulryan of a massive (if unspecified) bond which the developer paid to Wicklow County Council on the construction of the 1800 homes at Charlesland several years ago, the biggest development in the history of Wicklow County Council, is linked to the Florentine transaction. He also claims that when his own property business ran into difficulties, following the collapse, in late 2011 he met his bankers, Anglo Irish Bank, who wanted to know when he was going to get the €4 million he was owed by Mulryan. By this time, the distressed assets of Mulryan’s main property vehicle, Ballymore Properties, were in the National Assets Management Agency (NAMA) which was seeking to get the best value for the Irish exchequer from their disposal. Dooley told the bank’s executives in 2012 that he was going to chase Mulryan for the money through legal action if necessary. According to information obtained by Dooley under Data Protection legislation the detail of the conversation with his banker found its way from Anglo via NAMA to then senior Ballymore executive, Barry Hickey. According to the email discovered by Dooley the bank told Hickey that “GD (Gabriel Dooley) is under water” and “GD is going to sue you”. Following his receipt of the emails from NAMA, Hickey arranged to meet with Dooley. “We’ve always classed you as a friend of Ballymore”, Dooley recalls being told by Hickey who had been somewhat shocked to hear through his NAMA contact about the threat of legal action. It was clear that NAMA was concerned that as the holder of Ballymore’s assets and guarantees it could have been liable for any adverse court decision on the €4 million debt. “I went to see Hickey at their head office in Lucan two weeks later and he said he wanted to tell me two things. The first was that he wanted to make me an offer…. of €100,000. Then he said; ‘I’m leaving in two weeks’. I refused the offer”, Dooley told Village. In May 2012, he met Mulryan and Ballymore executive Brian Clarke in the Berkeley Court Hotel where once again he was offered a settlement, this time of an even smaller €75,000. “I told them that I had spent 18 years of my life helping them with the Charlesland and Florentine developments and that I’d rather starve than accept what I considered was an insult. They later came back with an offer of €500,000 which I also rejected”, Dooley said. By this time half a million euro would go nowhere near solving his own property debts. At the Berkeley Court meeting, Mulryan first indicated that Dooley would get nothing if a receiver was put into Florentine Properties Ltd. Dooley is concerned at the extent to which Mulryan seemed to be influencing NAMA’s approach to him and the receivership as it turned out that the shareholding contract Dooley had signed in 2005, at the height of the boom, included a clause that receivership would make his shares worthless. “He said if you don’t take the money I will put a receiver in and you will get nothing. I replied that if you
