Crosbies a good bit richer after land status decision

Cork Corporation may have added to the already considerable wealth of the Crosbie family by millions last week when it conferred Area of Renewal status on a three-acre site in Cork city that includes the Irish Examiner premises, but Mr Alan Crosbie doesn't see it as a windfall gain. "It is more like the result of 150 years of hard work," he says.

Mr Crosbie is managing director of Examiner Publications and a member of the fifth generation of the Crosbie family to publish the Irish Examiner, formerly The Examiner and before that the Cork Examiner.

The Crosbies - members of Cork's business elite dubbed the Merchant Princes - were already rich, but are now a good bit richer, on paper anyway, as a result of last week's decision.

Mr Crosbie is vague about how much money the re-designation may have made the family. "Cork Corporation have been talking about it for years. It is hard to put a value on the land. It changes from day to day and we have not had it valued recently," he said.

The accounts for Examiner Publications - which publishes the Irish Examiner and its sister, the Evening Echo - show a value for the group's lands and buildings of £2.6 million (€3.3 million) but this relates to the price paid for the land and buildings many years ago. The group's property portfolio includes the Cork city site - now valued at more than £20 million (€25 million) - and a Georgian building on Baggot Street where its Dublin office is based. The Dublin offices alone might be worth several million. There are other properties in Cork including a garage and a drapery store on the quays. At least some of the value in the group's property portfolio is expected to be unlocked in the next few years. The Examiner's current printing press is coming to the end of its useful life and plans are being made to move to a new one outside Cork city, with Clonmel being mooted as a possibility.

Despite its ambition to expand the Irish Examiner into a national paper the move to a Dublin location is unlikely due to the printing requirements of the Evening Echo.

The disappointing news for the extended Crosbie family is that they are unlikely to see any of the money when the group sells up in Cork. The cash raised through the sale or development of the Academy Street site will play an integral part in the financing of the new press, according to Mr Crosbie.

As it stands Examiner Publications is in rude good health. The most recent accounts for the year to January 1999 showed a profit of £3.4 million made on a turnover of £29 million.

Examiner Publications is a wholly-owned subsidiary of Thomas Crosbie Holdings, the family company. Apart from the two Cork based-papers it is the owner of a group of regional titles - including the Waterford News & Star - as well as other property investments and some forests in Kerry.

Its balance sheet gives a better indication of the Crosbie's combined financial muscle. The company has shareholders' funds of £22 million of which more than £18 million is accumulated profits. There is more than £5 million in cash and negligible long-term borrowings.

Under a complex structure put in place in the 1950s, Thomas Crobsie Holdings is controlled by three members of the Crosbie family although more than 20 members of the extended clan have an interest.

Four different classes of shares were created in the 1950s when the company was run by the late Mr Donal Crosbie, his brother George and their cousin Ted. The bulk of the ordinary shares are held equally by three companies, Newstone, Ardfoyle and Hettysfield. Each company is owned in turn by a trust associated with the one of the three men and their families. Respectively they are Mr Ted Crosbie, Mr Donal Crosbie and Mr George Crosbie.

Ordinary shares in Thomas Crobsie Holdings confer no voting rights. The only shares that have voting rights are the 1,500 fourth preference shares. These are split equally between Mr Ted Crosbie (69), the chairman of the company; Mr George Crosbie (74), who is retired; and Mr Billy Crosbie (45), the son of Mr Donal Crosbie. Mr Alan Crosbie (46), is the son of Mr George Crosbie.

The other members of the extended family mostly own just second and third preference shares which were issued in the past as a way of giving members of the family a guaranteed income.

In 1999 the owners of the preference shares received dividends totalling £12,000 while the ordinary shareholders split £485,000 between them. The preference shares have no voting rights and are not considered equity, so the holders of them would not normally share in any proceeds from the sale or break-up of the company. Few family businesses survive the transfer of control from a second generation to a third, let alone to a fifth with the sixth already in situ. Succession in family businesses is a pet subject of Mr Alan Crosbie's and he is publishing a book on the subject in the autumn.

The contents remain a secret but observers suggest that part of the family's success has been that the top job in the organisation did not pass automatically to the oldest member of the next generation.

The Crosbies have also not been afraid to give responsibility to trusted non-family members, the foremost of whom is Mr Anthony Dinan, the company secretary and director of Examiner Publications. He is also on the board of Thomas Crosbie Holdings and company secretary of Newstone, Ardfoyle and Hettyfield.

The Cork Examiner was founded in 1841 by John Francis Maguire, a nationalist member of parliament for Cork. Thomas Crosbie, a native of Kerry, acquired it in 1856. So successful was Crosbie that he is said to have been offered 700 guineas to join the Times in London but the offer was rescinded once they discovered he was a Catholic. He was succeeded by his son, the first George Crosbie, who was in turn succeeded by his two sons, Commander George Crosbie who served in the Naval Service during the second World War and his brother Tom Crosbie.

Their cousin, Jim Crosbie was involved in the paper and was also a Fine Gael senator, his legacy to the paper being a perceived association with that wing of Irish politics. Commander George Crosbie was the father of the late Donal Crosbie and his brother George. Mr Ted Crosbie is the son of Tom Crosbie.

The current (fifth generation) Crosbies are well represented in the company. Apart from Mr Alan Crosbie there is his brother Paul, who is in charge of advertising sales and management and based in Dublin. Their second cousin, Mr Tom Crosbie (37), the son of Mr Ted Crosbie, worked for the Examiner until last October when he left to run another Thomas Crosbie Holdings business, Recruit Ireland, an online recruitment agency. Mr Nigel O'Mahony, a nephew of Mr Ted Crosbie, is in charge of newspapers sales and marketing. The sixth generation is represented by Ms Wendy Good, niece of Mr Alan Crosbie, who is a news editor on the Evening Echo. Mr Billy Crosbie, one of the three controlling shareholders, was involved in the business until 1995 but subsequently left to pursue a career in music. Like his late father, Donal, he is an accomplished pianist.

For the time being Mr Alan Crosbie remains in the driving seat. The relaunch of the paper as the Irish Examiner is going well, with sales up by 5 per cent on last year's 60,000, he claims.

The possibility that the company might look again at the Sunday market has re-emerged following the decision to stop printing an Irish edition of the London Times and parts of the Sunday Times.

"We want to keep our options open and the increased print runs for the Examiner meant it was becoming very crowded on weekday nights when we printed the Times," he said.

Whatever happens, no doubt there will be a sixth generation of Crosbies to preside over it.