After making a fortune in the grocery business, Feargal Quinn cast his financial net in search of bountiful investments.
He hauled in a piece of Barry O'Callaghan's mighty minnow's dream of swallowing a publishing house whale.
Mr. Quinn swam with the sharks, only to get swallowed down himself.
With 400 million euros in profit from the sale of the SuperQuinn chain, he sank approximately 16 million into the deal that saw Riverdeep merge with Houghton Mifflin. Now comes word of a planned restructuring of the mountain of debt, and Mr. Quinn has seen his stake in Riverdeep-Houghton Mifflin-Harcourt-EMPG sink like a stone.
He's not the only Irish millionaire to fall victim to a dream of grandeur. Even a savvy banker like Sean Fitzpatrick tossed a bit of his cash into the pot. Now he's lost his investment in EMPG, and that coming on the heels of the failure of Anglo Irish Bank. No one knows for certain how much Anglo Irish cash was invested in Mr. O'Callaghan's projects, or how much he might owe the bank. The Irish people now own Anglo Irish, and the bank is insolvent.
Clients of Davy Stockbrokers were eaten by the debt shark as well, and they're in good company with the likes of financier Domhnail Slattery, who has also lost big.
Like a private club, the Irish millionaires invested in each other's schemes, only to find themselves all together at the bottom of the financial sea.
As for HMH, the whale of a publishing firm, it looks to be smoother sailing in the future. Thanks to a massive debt restructuring scheme that has seen so many Irish investors wiped out, the end product of the merger frenzy is in a stronger position going forward, and may very well survive the storm-tossed seas.
Barry O'Callaghan will be hoping to set up a nice little deal for himself, to recoup some of his spectacular losses. Surely the CEO of such a large firm as HMH is deserving of stock options and a hefty salary?
5 comments:
Of course your question is rhetorical - of *course* Mr O'Callaghan deserves a huge salary and stock options in the company. After all, it was just bad luck that he is around E200m down with almost no assets, and sheer bad luck that the Irish peole have had to pay for his bizarre belief that massively overpaying for an asset makes good business sense 'in the long term'.
Or of course he could be jailed for misleading investors, the government, the public et al?
How could you jail a man for dreaming?
The family home, however, is in his wife's name. Just in case those who are waking up from a very bad dream go looking for relief.
In his wife's name, huh? Well, in the event that the bank want their e200m back I guess they'll look long and hard at exactly when he put his home in her name.
Just a wild guess, but I wonder if he tried to put such assets beyond reach just before borrowing such a huge amount of money? I guess he wasn't *quite* as confident privately as he was in his public statements when he was trying to get other people to front up their cash?
But maybe I missed the Press Release that announced he'd "put everything in the wife's name just in case it all goes wrong"?
meanwhile us peons within the company have gone 3 years without raise or a bonus. In that time, our insurance costs have jumped double digits each year as well.
A wise gambler always hedges his bets.
Putting tangible assets in the names of family members is a time-honored tradition. Bernie Madoff's wife isn't living in a homeless shelter while he's in jail and the people he scammed are out of pocket.
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