“What I am very interested about is how the Ulster Bank had sought to have him declared bankrupt here in Ireland six weeks previously. They had some man over in America running around trying to serve papers on him and they didn’t manage to serve papers. Now I am a reporter in a newspaper (sic). If you told me tomorrow, go get on a plane, go find a man and put an envelope in his hand, I’d do that within 48 hours so I don’t understand what this guy from the Ulster Bank was on a per diem rate and he was working it up and saying if I run around for six weeks, I could just charge them a couple of hundred dollars a day, I don’t know. I mean all you had to do was sit in the car down the road from Sean Dunne’s house, wait until he comes out the gate, goes for a train or goes for a pint of milk down the road. “How you going Sean, here’s the papers, come back to Ireland”” Ronald Quinlan speaking on Tonight with Vincent Browne 9th April 2013
Vincent Browne last night – 10 days after the subject had been talked to death elsewhere – addressed the subject of Sean Dunne and Irish citizens going abroad for bankruptcy. He was joined by a panel which included the Sunday Independent’s Special correspondent, Ronald Quinlan who claimed that Ulster Bank had engaged someone to serve bankruptcy papers on Sean in the US in the six weeks before Sean’s Good Friday filing for bankruptcy in Connecticut – remember in February 2013, Ulster Bank sought permission from the High Court to serve bankruptcy papers on Sean in the US. Ronald is baffled and said that if he had been told to go “find a man and put an envelope in his hand”, he could do that within 48 hours. And Ronald just doesn’t understand how the man from Ulster Bank was unable to serve Sean. After all, it was just a matter of waiting in a car outside Sean’s gaff and when Sean came out of his house to fetch “a pint of milk” it would be gotcha!
At a general level, what the programme didn’t really appreciate is that there is a financial difference between a 3-12 year bankruptcy in Ireland compared to a 5-month bankruptcy in Connecticut because in both jurisdictions, your earnings during the bankruptcy are seized with you left with just enough for basic living expenses. I don’t know what Sean’s earning potential is these days, but given his experience and bulging address book, it is likely well north of €100,000. So there’s a €250,000 difference (less basic living expenses) between an Irish and a Connecticut bankruptcy. And during the 3-year period there may be digging for undisclosed assets or scrutiny of transfers – this can also take place after discharge but during the bankruptcy period it is more potent. Okay, Sean might be out of work at present and might decide to sit around on his backside for the next three years in Ireland during an Irish bankruptcy, but for a man who has been dynamic throughout his adult life, that would be painful.
So, apart from claims about Ulster Bank trying to serve papers on Sean, not much light shone on anything else. British taxpayers who fund Royal Bank of Scotland which owns Ulster Bank might ask questions about the failure of their man to serve bankruptcy papers, but for us, it’s not really relevant.
And lastly, Ronald says in terms of transparency, what would be interesting would be if NAMA were to tell us the sheer level of indebtedness of developers on the day their loans were brought into NAMA. This information on the NAMA website might help there!
NAMA Wine Lake 
I presume a property with a $17,500 monthly rental price tag comes with a set of electronic gates so it might not be as easy to serve papers on Dunne as Ronald Quinlan imagines.
Good Story in the local freebee paper in Wicklow about Sean Dunne.
Apparently he owes millions to the Wicklow county council. This is as a result of payments developers were supposed to make by way of compensation for not building 20% social housing in their developments. Sean Dunne’s main development was Charlesland in Greystones which was a massive development and which had been almost completely finished and sold before the property crash occurred.
It was bad enough that the county council allowed developers avoid building 20% social housing but to not collect the cash which was to be given in exchange at the time of sale of these houses casts a huge shadow over the competence of the County management and the county councilors.
Why did they not insist on payment being made at the time the houses were sold?
Compare this to the efforts the council goes to to collect rates from small businesses or the property tax from householders.
“Dynamic”? As in: “The typhoon dynamically rearranged the sleepy beach huts.” Or, “He dynamically descended into inevitable bankruptcy at others’ expense.”?
We could have all done with a little less of Mr Dunne’s dynamism during the boom. A lot less in fact.
@OMF, no I mean “dynamic” as in building a massive business over a 25-year period, employing 200 people, constructing 3,500 homes, developing a large commercial property portfolio in Ireland and overseas, paying €100m in personal taxes plus unspecified development levies and corporate taxes, developing extensive relationships and partnerships with others, many of whom see him as an enlightened mentor and creating property and plans of value, and some would say vision.
His business didn’t fail because he got the human resources or accounts or administration wrong, or that he was lazy and spent too much time devoted to his social life and hobbies despite his incredible wealth at the height of the boom, or that he fiddled the books for his personal enrichment. It failed because the backside fell out of the Irish property and banking sectors.
And fine in Ireland, there is limited demand for new property at present and the banks aren’t lending, so he doesn’t have a business here. He says he’s not involved in the US developments of his wife, but you might safely assume he is at least offering his advice, And I can’t see him sitting around for years.
@NWL
145 people borrowing over 100m, to a total of just under €60bn.
The government, PS, regulators and bankers that oversaw or allowed that, should be stripped of pensions and made to feel the pain they have caused.
Smart people knew these loans would never be repaid.
@Joseph, I was going to dispute what you said because the lending is oftentimes to companies secured on assets and some of the lending is not in property but is acquired by NAMA because it is associated with a developer, but yes, as we look at these figures, the concentration in both individuals (and their companies) and sector (most being property) is staggering. Chasing profits in an ever-growing market trumped prudence, and yes, it was the regulators who had primary responsibility – bankers are and should be greedy, regulators are there to rein in activity which otherwise could collapse the economy, which in the event, it did.
Hold on. So called bankers are actually managers and executives accountable to directors and thereby to shareholders. If ‘bankers’ are greedy, it is, in the first instance, the role of the directors (especially the indies) to rein them in. I would have thought that regulators should be the backstop rather than in the first line of control. The bankers, like their gambling clients, were mispricing risk, overleveraged, overconcentrated and reliant on a bubble/ponzi strategy for future growth. For those reasons, I’d add incompetence to greed as characteristics.
@Brian, I think directors and managers at banks have a primary responsibility to their stakeholders, principally their shareholders. I think the regulator has a primary responsibility to the State and its citizens. Yes, the directors and managers let their shareholders down because ultimately the shareholders lost their investments or suffered massive losses. But ultimately a failed bank should have been just another failed business. It was the regulator who allowed things to so get out of control that the State and its citizens have paid for the failed business.
I wonder whether we will ever see a report on the Irish banks like the UK’s parliamentary report on HBOS.
http://www.publications.parliament.uk/pa/jt201213/jtselect/jtpcbs/144/14402.htm#evidence
Even the chapter headings read like a thriller – “The best board I ever sat on”, “The price of failure”, “Conclusion – a manual for bad banking”
Personally, I think that the horse has nearly bolted and that the establishment does not have the stomach for a “full blooded” inquiry that would make the DIRT inquiry look like a picnic. Instead, maybe our politicians could get a copy of the HBOS report and do a quick search/replace of names, places and dates as I suspect that the findings and conclusions could remain unchanged.
If recall correctly approximately 800 debtors were responsible for €74 billion “bad loans” transfer from the covered banks balance sheets to NAMA, with approximately 100 debtors being responsible for 80% of €74 billion loans.
I think that the edition of Tonight with Vincent Brown cited above was one of the more informative shows in more recent times.