Dunne gave wife €58m to buy home

Former property developer Sean Dunne confirmed yesterday that he gifted his wife €58m to purchase Ireland’s most expensive residential home.

At the height of the boom, Walford on Dublin’s Shrewsbury Road was bought for a record price, and although it was long speculated that former gossip columnist Gayle Killilea had a financial interest, neither she nor her husband admitted this publicly.

Mr Dunne was back at the offices of US trustee Rich Coan in New Haven to face his creditors, including Nama and Ulster Bank as he underwent another day of cross-examination as part of US bankruptcy proceedings.

The copy of a Dunne family postnuptial agreement was produced by Nama lawyers yesterday having originally been drawn up between the so-called Baron of Ballsbridge and his wife in Thailand in 2005. It specified that Mr Dunne transferred a cash payment of almost €60m to his wife for the purposes of securing her financial independence and that of their children.

A protracted discussion once again delved into the now infamous ‘postnuptial’ a year after they were married.

A copy was produced by attorney Tom Curran who cross-examined Mr Dunne on behalf of Nama.

Mr Dunne testified that the couple didn’t spend too much time on their prenuptial agreement but were keen to ensure the financial independence of Ms Killilea and their children. When they consulted an Irish lawyer about the prenup the Dunnes were told that the agreement “wasn’t worth the paper it was written on”.

During a morning and afternoon session laced with terse comments, a line of questioning from Curran which sought to establish what resources Ms Killilea was bringing into their 2004 marriage, Mr Dunne stonewalled the Nama lawyer.

“She didn’t produce a list of assets,” he replied. “She didn’t have to bring any assets … it wasn’t a condition of marriage.

“She had her own money, she had her own investments. She still has… unlike myself,” he added.

He estimated that she earned about €100k per annum from his property development company DCD Builders for interior decoration, consultancy and other duties, but said that given the fact that they had 20 projects on the go, he couldn’t specify exactly what she did.

Dunne confirmed that DCD money was used for payment of personal expenses from 2005 onwards.

“I lent €200m to the company. It was my money, money I lent to the company. It was all above board… It was documented every year. you have all the accounts.”

When asked if the money was repaid, he replied: “I was owed €160m-€170m when the company was liquidated. Nama weren’t the only ones to suffer. We all suffered.”

Attention then switched to the €58m payment to his wife. The morning session saw Mr Dunne confirm that this took the form of an acquisition of an asset plus costs, a “cash purchase… property acquired for her under her name”.

When asked where he gathered together the huge sum of money from, he said “it came from one of my pockets, one of my accounts, or one of my companies, or a combination of all three”.

Meanwhile, the sale of a portion of Woodtown Manor in Rathfarnham (33 out of its 165 acres) yielded a €70m profit for DCD in 2006/07, a sum that was also paid in cash, although Mr Dunne sarcastically told Mr Curran that the money was “brought in in a suitcase and set on a table”.

Earlier in the day, Mr Dunne denied the couple were estranged at the time of the court action in Switzerland which Ms Killilea took against her husband. Despite suing for €44m, they were, Mr Dunne, testified, living together on a continuous basis in Geneva.