When Delgany native Nick O’Conor left school in 1979, he spent the summer hitchhiking around France with his friends before going to college at Trinity College. Sensibly, his accountant father armed him with a contact book should he get into difficulty.
When he found himself stranded near Nice because a promised lift never materialised, the youngster duly rang his father’s colleague, David Tugman, who ran the Monaco office of Moore Stephens, who then assisted him in his passage home.
Ten years later, as a qualified accountant himself, O’Conor wrote to Tugman looking for a job in Monaco. He was offered a position and has not looked back since, having since married and raised his children in the south of France.
His expertise and experience has seen him work in a variety of roles over the years, including accountancy and audit, maritime insurance and financial management and consultancy.
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Working in Monaco and living in nearby Nice has also brought him into contact with high rollers. One of his first jobs involved auditing for some of the world’s largest private ship owners, including Greek billionaire tycoon Stavros Niarchos.
“It exposed me to the immense wealth that existed in Monaco and in the world. When you come from Ireland, you have an idea of relative wealth, but when you see this degree of wealth, it is amazing.”
O’Conor went out on his own as a financial consultant in 2010. Among his clients have been Irish investors burnt by buying property in the region through the Residence de Tourisme scheme. These off-plan properties, often referred to as leasebacks, offered what appeared to be very generous tax breaks and guaranteed rents but in many cases, investors came to rue their purchases as lower than expected rents and high management charges saw many of them haemorrhaging cash.
Notwithstanding the difficulties involved, O’Conor was able to help a significant number of clients exit bad investments, minimising their losses.
`Distressed owners’
“I worked with a lot of distressed owners. The law was very much in favour of the property managers and the investors hadn’t read the small print. Once you are in a contract, it is very hard to get out of it.
“I used to say to clients that I am trilingual. I speak English, French and finance but Irish investors didn’t understand what they were getting into. A very common complaint was that ‘it is not like that at home’.”
France’s reputation for bureaucracy is well-founded, he maintains. “You can be certain that if you go to any office to apply for something, you will have a paper missing. But once you know how things work here, you can succeed if you are patient.”
While he has taken early retirement recently from his professional role, O’Conor has kept his hand in the world of business in his role as treasurer of Network Irlande, which assists Irish firms to do business in France, as well as participating in the Franco Ireland Economic Forum.
Understanding the local language is a basic need for anyone who wants to succeed in any business venture in France, as “not speaking it is considered a form of insult” but it goes further than that, he says.
“It’s a tough market to crack. Apart from the language barrier, there’s the understanding barrier in terms of how the system works.
“It’s not like entering the US where a contract can be signed quickly. Here it can take three years, and you have to have the patience and the resources, as well as the cultural awareness.”
Away from work, O’Conor generally enjoys the French Riviera climate, the relaxed vibe and the attractions on his doorstep.
“There’s 260 days of sunshine and I can swim on New Year’s Day. You can swim in the morning and drive a short distance to ski in the afternoon. Nice is a small enough city, the way Dublin was 30 years ago, with a population of around 350,000 in the metropolitan area, extending to around one million in its hinterland.
“I move around a lot on a petrol scooter. There’s no point using a car in the city. I can get to the airport or to Monaco in 20 minutes.”
Nice has a vibrant arts scene, with around 20 theatres as well as a number of high quality art museums. O’Conor has a passion for the arts and is one of the founders of the Monaco Ireland Arts Society. Its activities include dramatised readings hosted in the Princess Grace Irish Library, as well as celebrations of James Joyce’s Bloomsday. O’Conor has also appeared in pantomimes organised by a local English arts group.
The one downside of living in Nice is the increasingly high temperatures in the middle of summer.
“It can get really hot here in July and August and that’s when I miss the Irish rain. My house is 100 years old and built to withstand heat but in the last two years, by the end of July, the walls have heated up, you are baking and you want to be somewhere cooler. We spent last summer in the Beara Peninsula which was lovely. It’s strange to say to Irish people that you miss the bad weather, but a lot of French people like to visit Ireland for that very reason.”
