Bumper year for some, day of heartbreak for others

The past year has been a bumper one for some of the country's entrepreneurs, with many companies being sold for hefty sums of money. However, for all of the money generated by those with the midas touch, there are many investors and shareholders nursing some serious losses.

The stock market might have bounced back well from its autumn hiatus, but that rising tide has not lifted all ships.

However, since it is the festive season, it seems only fair to salute those who have done pretty well this year. And there is no question who has done the best - Dermot Desmond.

Everything the stocbroker-turned-entrepreneur has turned his hand to this year has turned to gold. His biggest coup was to get £22 million in cash and shares when British software group Zergo bought Baltimore Technologies - in which he held a majority stake - for £40 million. Earlier, Desmond did very nicely after his IIU investment vehicle made a profit of nearly £4 million on Golden Vale shares.

Add to that the stratospheric rise of Celtic shares (pity about the performance on the football field), and his investments have left with plenty of cash to fund the massive redevelopment of Sandy Lane Hotel in Barbados - together with his golfing buddies and investment partners, J.P. McManus and John Magnier.

Dermot Desmond might be the most obvious beneficiary of the boom in acquisition activity in the past year, but some emerged from nowhere to become multi-millionaires. Just as Galway's Joe Higgins emerged from near-total obscurity in 1997 to coin £25 million from the sale of his engineering company, few had heard of Mike Enright before this year, when he sold his Walsh Western Logistics business for £18 million - and that's only for starters, with the same again payable in earn-outs, or extra payments tied to future profit targets.

The Goodbody stockbroking and legal family is a diverse one and the Galway branch did rather well when Connacht & Court - half-owned by the family - was sold to a British company for £34 million.

Bill McCabe made a fortune when he sold $40 million worth of CBT shares - shortly before it all went wrong for the educational software company, with a profits warning and a headlong retreat by investors knocking CBT shares back from over $60 to less than $7.

McCabe is once again back at the helm at CBT and presumably has lots of money to rebuild his shareholding in the software company. $40 million would buy an awful lot of CBT shares just now!

Personal fortunes were generated by some of those further down the pecking order, and none was bigger than the deal done by Telecom Eireann staff which gives them 14.9 per cent of the company ahead of next year's flotation.

The 10,000-odd Telecom staff received a free 5 per cent of their company, plus another 9.9 per cent linked to changes in pension contributions and productivity. Not bad, given that Telecom is likely to worth a least £3 billion and possibly closer to £4 billion when it floats. That means the 14.9 per cent of Telecom in the staff ESOP trust will probably be worth £450£600 million. Nice one!

And what about the Team Aer Lingus workers? After a long battle, most of the workers agreed to transfer jobs and allow Aer Lingus to sell off its lossmaking subsidiary to FLS. Moreover, with an average of £34,000 from Aer Lingus to buy out their letters of comfort, no doubt there will be some happy households out in north Dublin.

However, it is not all about cash, and some high profile deals were done. David Went and Roy Douglas put together the £2.9 billion Irish Life/Irish Permanent merger; Denis Brosnan continued to drive Kerry - a hotch-potch of small dairy co-ops only 20 years ago - forward to a position where the group is in the top rank of food ingredients companies.

A good year for Denis O'Brien as well, with Esat growing fast and now set to challenge Telecom Eireann in the home telecoms market. The ebullient chairman also added to his own fortune when he sold over £4 million worth of Esat shares, a sale that went some way towards paying for his purchase of the Quinta do Lago golf resort in Portugal for £25 million.

Who else did well? Peter Sutherland spearheaded BP's £34 billion takeover of Amoco, the Doyle family decided to "merge" the family-hotel group with Jurys and Eddie Jordan made a killing when he persuaded Wall Street investment house Warburg Pincus to buy a chunk of his motor racing company.

Nevertheless, 1998 was a dismal year for some, and it probably was not a very happy Christmas at the Murtagh household in Cavan, after Brendan Murtagh was forced to resign as a director of Kingspan, after a wife and a friend of sons Alan and Fergal were found to have bought shares in Kingspan's bid target Hewetson.

Not a good year either for Patrick Cruise O'Brien, who presided over a fall in the Stentor share price from 196p to 31/2p and eventually left the telecoms group after is was rescued. Not a terribly good year either for Tony O'Reilly and Michael Smurfit - who saw their personal fortunes (at least on paper) plummet as the share prices of Independent, Waterford Wedgwood, Arcon and Smurfit sank like a stone.

Bill McCabe, of course, has done well out his timely sale of $40 million worth of CBT shares. The same, unfortunately, cannot be said for the poor CBT shareholders who have seen the value of their investment fall catastrophically. Hopefully, Mr McCabe will be able to weave some magic for his suffering shareholders.

Moreover, it was not a very good year for Oisin Fanning, managing director of MMI, the stockbroking firm that nearly went belly-up after a sizeable number of its customers simply decided not to pay their debts. MMI was eventually taken over, but for Mr Fanning and his colleagues at MMI it is back to money broking.

And some in the banking sector will also be hoping for a more peaceful 1999. Controversy hit the sector this year, starting when RTE News revealed offshore accounts and account overcharging by National Irish Bank. There followed revelations of mis-selling of products at Irish Life and a serious disagreement between AIB and the Revenue Commissioners over whether a "deal" had been reached on DIRT tax due on bogus non-resident accounts. Investigations into these controversies are to continue into 1999.