Buying distressed asset helps fuel a profitable business for Denis O’Brien

Buying the distressed assets from the economic bust has proved a profitable business for many of those involved, including the many large investment funds who piled into Ireland via purchases from Nama or the IBRC.

Now one of the assets purchased, the Topaz business, has been sold on for considerably more than the IBRC liquidators received for it from businessman Denis O’Brien.

There has been significant investment in Topaz in the meantime – including its recent purchase of Esso – but it is reasonable to conclude that O’Brien is driving off the forecourt with a significant profit.

There has already been controversy about the sale of Siteserv to a company controlled by O’Brien in March 2012. The price was €45.4 million and IBRC wrote off €110 million of the €150 million debt owed by the company.

Aspects of the deal caused considerable controversy, and were a contributory factor to the establishment of the Commission of Investigation into IBRC, now mired in legal problems from which the Government is trying to plot an escape route.

The sale of the Topaz loans was different in that it was conducted not by IBRC itself but by the IBRC special liquidators in December 2013 following the wind-up of the bank the previous February.

They organised the sale of the Topaz loans via an auction and it appears that the O’Brien bid was the highest by a distance. He was already a minority shareholder in Topaz – the majority shareholder was Neil O’Leary’s Ion Equity.

Ion is also believed to have bid for the loans, along with at least one other consortium.

Liquidat

ion date The sale of the Topaz loans falls outside the time period being examined by the Commission of Investigation, which end

s at the IBRC liquidation date.

However, Topaz and its future was discussed before the IBRC liquidation. In March 2012 a memo notes that Topaz had approached the Department of Finance to complain about some aspect of the IBRC’s handling of it. The department told it to talk to IBRC chairman Alan Dukes.

The commission is also now, presumably, in possession of a memo referred to by former IBRC chief executive Mike Aynsley at the banking inquiry.

He told the inquiry that a memo from a staff member had alleged that a Department of Finance official had said that the Minister for Finance Michael Noonan would prefer if a major asset then up for sale was not sold to a certain businessman, even if his offer was €100 million more than anyone else.

It is believed that Aynsley was referring to O’Brien and the Topaz deal and suggesting that Noonan did not want the asset sold to the businessman.

A number of other sources dispute his interpretation, and the facts of what happened.

It is possible that if the commission ever gets going it could examine the Topaz deal and particularly Aynsley’s claim.