On here, he will be best known for walking away with the lions-share of the sale proceeds from the Irish Glass Bottle site which was sold in 2006 for €412m, but it is the packaging business that has been making Dublin financier and businessman, Paul Coulson, wealthy in recent times. Just last week, Paul’s Luxembourg-based Ardagh group paid USD 1.7bn (€1.3bn) for US packaging company, Saint-Gobain, which means that Ardagh should now have an annual turnover of €5.4bn.
All impressive stuff for one of the winners, after the Irish banking and property collapse.
Yesterday, the British commercial property portal, CoStar reported a deal involving an Irish property company – Aldgate Developments. The company has secured rare-as-hens-teeth development finance for the speculative development of Aldgate Tower in the City of London. It’s “speculative” because tenants are not lined up for the planned 317,000 sq ft, 17-storey tower at 10 Whitechapel High Street.
Aldgate Developments is controlled by Oisin Quinn (39) and Paul Molloy (35) but the British property portal and magazine, Real Estate Capital reports that it is backed by “the Gleeson brothers and Paul Coulson” The “Gleeson brothers” have not been identified by the portal, and we are awaiting a response from Real Estate Capital as to their precise identities.
It is reported by both British portals that private equity firm Helios Capital and Geneva-based wealth-management group GWM are providing GBP 85.5m (€101m) for the GBP 200m (€237m) development.
UPDATE: 22nd January, 2012. Real Estate Capital has confirmed that the “Gleeson brothers” are Peter Gleeson and William Gleeson. Peter is a director at Jefferson Smurfit. See entry 183 in the Irish Times’ Rich List here for some more info
