Smurfit predicts strong recovery over next 5 years

The Irish economy has taken a massive hammering over the past few years, but it will make a strong recovery, said Michael Smurfit.

“In five years time, people will look back on this and wonder what they were worried about. We are still coming out of it now and it still feels like a hangover.

“There was always going to be a housing correction in Ireland, but what happened was that we were hit by a perfect storm.

“First Lehman Brothers collapsed, which caused chaos in the worldwide banking system and that did huge damage to the Irish banking system.”

The health and durability of the recovery hinges on consumer confidence returning, he added.

Mr Smurfit spoke to the Irish Examiner at the launch of his biography, A life worth living.

He reveals he was caught in the credit crunch. The Monaco-based former chief executive and still the largest single shareholder of Smurfit Kappa, was building a luxury yacht when the economy collapsed.

He already had a 50ft yacht name after his mother, the Lady Ann Magee, which he needed to offload. “But there was no market for boats over 50ft. Quite by chance I bumped into Joseph Lau in Monaco who was looking for a boat so he bought the Lady Ann Magee and turned it into the Lady Lau. It was pure luck. It was the only boat of its kind sold in a two year period.”

Mr Lau is a Hong Kong based billionaire developer who has since been indicted on corruption charges.

The book is an extensive trawl through Mr Smurfit’s early life and career. He took Jefferson Smurfit from a small Irish-based packaging company, to being one of the largest in the world in that sector.

He also deals with the controversy caused in the early 1990s over the sale of the Johnson, Mooney & O’Brien site in Ballsbridge. Mr Smurfit was chairman of Telecom. It emerged he had also had an investment in a company that had previously owned the & site.

“It was annoying and a source of concern to me that I was getting this type of press coverage, which was totally unwarranted, but because I know that I had done nothing wrong, I was not too worried.”

Then taoiseach Charles Haughey, appointed an inspector to investigate the claim. Mr Haughey said in a radio interview that Mr Smurfit should step aside for the length of the investigation, which lasted two years. The chairman instead resigned and was subsequently exonerated of any wrongdoing.

“Charles Haughey did a great deal for Ireland; nonetheless, he cast a stain on my name that eventually got erased on the outcome of the inquiry, but I would have preferred to have left Telecom in different circumstances.”