http://www.independent.ie/national-news/courts/tycoon-faces-life-on-836411000-state-pension-2138574.html

Remind me again why Irish businessmen never discovered the joys of limited liability?

So is all this on the back of a €28 million judgement against a private company?

Are directors usually protected from personal liability in a private limited company? Or were personal guarantees involved in this case.

Explain to a dumbass please.

Strip developers of riches but not the shirt off their backs
April 18, 2010
Frank FitzGibbon

Property developers probably haven’t been sleeping too well of late but few of them, I imagine, will have slept at all last Wednesday night if they digested Justice Peter Kelly’s scathing judgment on Brendan Murtagh earlier that day.

Murtagh, who in better days resided in our annual Rich List, has managed to turn a fortune of €271m into a deficit of €353m. He has gone from minted to skinted in the space of a couple of years, brought down by property plays and other investments that soured badly.

The Cavanman seems to have been an inveterate gambler (a problem that afflicts more than a few entrepreneurs from the northeast) but Justice Kelly had not a scintilla of sympathy when the latest instalment in his case came before the courts last week.

The judge’s decision to allow the appointment of a receiver to Murtagh’s personal pension fund, in order to raise money for creditors who have claimed €28m against him (some €60m in judgments against Murtagh have piled up so far), was a ground-breaking decision. But the remarks from the judge that accompanied the decision were somewhat perplexing.

.....(cont'd)

€353m debtor Murtagh: 'I do not feel one bit responsible for borrowings'
Sunday April 18 2010
By Shane Ross

Brendan Murtagh, the Kingspan founder and director with liabilities of over €353m, has hit out at the bankers and developers who landed him in his precarious financial position.

Mr Murtagh says that he "never approached the banks about lending in the Howard Holdings case. I was not involved in any of the negotiations but as a shareholder gave personal guarantees. This was normal". Howard Holdings is a Cork property company whose UK subsidiary was put into liquidation last year. Mr Murtagh was a large shareholder and non-executive director.

Howard Holdings owes Anglo Irish close to €500m .

Speaking to the Sunday Independent, Mr Murtagh insisted: "The enforcement of personal guarantees will make a nonsense out of Nama as the State asset management agency will be pursuing people who are financially dead."

.....(cont'd)

Murtagh, the judge declared last week, “would have to come to terms with the fact that he was no longer very wealthy and may have to reduce his living standards accordingly. He was an example of some of those wealthy persons . . . who never seemed to be satisfied with what they had, but seemed to require more and more . . . Such persons had apparently forgotten hubris is usually followed by nemesis”. Samuel L Jackson quoting scripture in Pulp Fiction didn’t sound this moralistic.

The investors allege breach of contract, negligence, breach of fiduciary duty and breach of trust by B.D.O. in relation to the investment known as “Project Poland”.

It is claimed the investors were told Project Poland was to be managed by Howard Holdings when, it is alleged, the project was a side project of two directors of that firm. It is also claimed B.D.O. had very little information about the project when allegedly recommending it to “valued clients” and others from late 2006.

B.D.O gave investors the impression everything was under control when the project was running into serious problems, retired company director Denis McFerran, Swords Road, Malahide, Co Dublin, who invested €500,000, said in an affidavit.

Mr McFerran also claimed investors were told Howard Holdings and its directors would guarantee the investment sums and that net worth statements supplied in January 2007 put their estimated net worth at €115 million. However, when the investors sought to enforce a €28 million judgment against those guarantors, two were hopelessly insolvent while Mr Murtagh also had “little to offer”, he said.

Mr Justice Peter Kelly yesterday transferred the proceedings against B.D.O to the Commercial Court. The firm has said it will be fully defending the proceedings and does not accept the claims.

By the peak of the bubble Accountants were very much a part of the promotion of property investment syndicate activity. Unsurprisingly these promoters are in the firing line some years later. One retired couple were in for €3m. All lost I fear.

Most of the money was made on commission .....for bringing their clients in to be roadshowed.

http://www.irishtimes.com/newspaper/fin ... 68942.html