Mick Clifford: Michael Lynn’s denial reveals lack of self-awareness
The Celtic Tiger was at full gallop when the All-Ireland football final came around in September 2006.
One arresting advertisement in the match programme had Portuguese soccer star Rui Costa and Mayo footballing legend Willie Joe Padden teaming up to recommend buying property in Portugal.
Neither man had a clue at the time, but they were both representing a crook.
Like many others, they had been taken in by Michael Lynn’s smooth sales patter and his ability to bluff and steal.
His company, Kendar Holdings, was flogged apartments on the Iberia peninsula.
The contrast between the pair, Costa, the suave millionaire footballer with his Mediterranean complexion, and Padden, a paragon of the GAA in the West of Ireland, spoke of this country’s arrival in the big time.
We, the Irish, were now entitled to the glamour, the place in the sun, many miles from the underdeveloped country that had so long curtailed aspirations and dreams.
At the time, Lynn was reputed to own over one hundred properties.
He had all the appearance of a man with the Midas touch, making the most of a fevered boom, spreading his magic, riding the Celtic Tiger’s tale.
On Monday, Lynn was sentenced to five and a half years in prison for stealing €17.9m.
He was convicted of ten counts of theft from six financial institutions, back in the day. The theft was perpetrated by taking out multiple mortgages on single properties in his capacity as a solicitor.
He was juggling interests, buying property with money that had been borrowed to pay for mortgages allegedly taken out by clients of his.
He had abused a system of trust in which solicitors gave an “undertaking” about the rectitude of their role at the interface of borrower and lender.
His journey to justice turned into an Odyssey.
In 2007, the Law Society began investigating him. Later that year, he was due before the High Court.
He fled to Portugal, although in his criminal trial, he took exception to the term “fled”.
The gardaí were very anxious to talk to him but he had no intention of coming home.
Before long, he was off to Brazil, to pursue, he would claim, further interests in a country that didn’t have an extradition treaty with Ireland.
He spent over four years in prison in Brazil fighting an extradition request.
The conditions he was kept in — among the general prison population — sound like a harsher sentence than anything the courts here could ever hand down. However, as a detective pointed out at his sentencing hearing, he could have come home at any stage “at the stroke of a pen”.
The period of terrible incarceration was taken into account by Judge Martin Nolan in computing Lynn’s sentence.
His conviction last December came at the end of a second trial on these charges after the first failed to reach a verdict.
Lynn’s reaction has been curious. His solicitor, Ciarán Mulholland, said he is going to appeal the conviction and sentence. Nothing unusual in that.
However, he also instructed his solicitor to call on his behalf for a banking tribunal or inquiry.
The move suggests that as far as Lynn is concerned it was a case of “the banks made me do it”.
Speaking on Newstalk Breakfast yesterday, Mulholland pointed out that the trial had left “a hell of a lot more questions than answers”.
“It hasn’t brought any form of conclusion to proceedings of what was going on at the time,” the solicitor told Shane Coleman.
“We all know there was reckless banking and there was a cavalier manner in which the banks conducted themselves,” he said.
On one level, this defence is plausible.
The long view of the years of madness that informed the property boom has been a little more forgiving than the understandable rage in the immediate aftermath.
The late Minister for Finance Brian Lenihan was excoriated for once suggesting “we all partied” during those years.
We didn’t, but some did, and many lost the run of themselves.
Ordinary workers flocked to property roadshows, like those held by Kendar, just as many had attended faith healers in the old days.
They remortgaged homes and in doing so mortgaged their futures.
People like Lynn who appeared to have the golden touch held out the promise that old rules no longer applied.
At the coalface of the boom, bankers did throw out money like confetti, with eyes only on the bonuses that would accrue to them.
Some developers cut corners that would have long-term consequences for homebuyers. And there were solicitors, crucial to the frenzied culture of transactions, who also took shortcuts.
But the idea that all culpability can be wrapped up and laid at the door of the banks is highly fanciful.
Certainly, some personnel at all levels of financial institutions behaved appallingly. The government at the time simply looked the other way rather than instilling a culture of regulation in both finance and construction.
And other arms of the state, including the media, failed to live up to their duty of vigilance.
There is thus a whole range of culpability, right across power centres, and at different levels in institutions and organisations.
But the extent of greed displayed by those like Lynn who were up to their oxters in the culture of the day can’t be attributed to, as his solicitor Mulholland said, “decisions taken by a young man in his thirties during a toxic period in the Irish economy”.
Stealing just under €18m is not cutting a corner.
This was not a solicitor under pressure who made a few dodgy transactions against his better judgement during a time of frenzy.
The evidence heard at his trials suggests a systemic approach to getting his hands on money that could be invested to make him more money.
Lynn developed a custom of taking advantage of a lax system in which trust had been vested in him by dint of his legal qualification.
That he would, at the end of his odyssey to justice, demand an inquiry to somehow assuage his guilt, suggests a man who has learned nothing and cares even less about those who, at the end of the chain of financial transactions, were his victims.
The Irish Times has reported that he is now the subject of a garda investigation into financial activity since he returned from Brazil in 2019.
The report stated that Lynn’s family home and four other properties had been raided by armed officers investigating alleged crimes.
His solicitor told Newstalk Breakfast that his client denies any involvement in money laundering.
Lynn is now 55 years of age, facing a prison sentence at a time when, if he had faced up to his crimes from day one, he could have long embarked on a new life.
The fault is his and his alone.
Looking to blame others at this stage of the game suggests that, however he spent his years in the interim, he didn’t acquire any self-awareness.
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