The special liquidators of Irish Bank Resolution Corporation (IBRC) have put the company’s final property asset on the market: a Dublin 4 apartment once owned by disgraced former solicitor Michael Lynn.
The three-bedroom property in the Gasworks apartment complex in Barrow Street is up for auction at the end of the month with an advised minimum value of €675,000.
Sources say the sale will leave IBRC, which had a loan and assets portfolio with a par value of €21.7 billion when it was put into liquidation in early 2013, with just one small loan on its balance sheet. This is set to transfer to a resolution unit being set up in the National Treasury Management Agency (NTMA), along with a remaining IBRC legal cases.
IBRC housed the remains of Anglo Irish Bank and Irish Nationwide Building Society (INBS), after both were nationalised during the financial crisis. The liquidators are Kieran Wallace and Eamonn Richardson of Interpath Advisory Ireland.
RM Block
Lynn was convicted in December 2023 of stealing about €18 million from six financial institutions, including INBS, during the Celtic Tiger era – often fraudulently obtaining multiple mortgages on the same properties unknown to the various lenders.
Lynn was sentenced to more than 5½ years in prison, but is pursuing a Supreme Court challenge seeking to reduce this, to account for time he spent in jail in Brazil while awaiting extradition back to Ireland to face trial.
Representatives for the liquidators declined to comment on the planned former Lynn apartment sale.
The wind-down of the remaining IBRC assets accelerated earlier this year when the joint liquidators surprised many observers by offloading assets in Ukraine and Russia that once belonged to businessman Seán Quinn’s family, once Anglo Irish Bank’s biggest debtor.
It emerged in January that a Russian investment company, Kama Capital, had bought a 20-storey Moscow office block and a big logistics centre in Kazan, almost 800km east of the Russian capital, from a unit of IBRC.
They were estimated to have a combined value of about €100 million before Russia invaded Ukraine in 2022. The sale price is believed to be well below that value.
The Irish Times reported in June that an Israeli businessman, Ofer Kerzner, had acquired former Quinn properties in Kyiv – a shopping centre and office complex – from IBRC for between €40 million and €50 million. That was substantially below their estimated €70 million-€80 million combined value before the war.
It follows a flurry of activity in 2024 that saw the liquidators sell a number of other former Quinn assets – including Buswells Hotel in Dublin and the Slieve Russell resort in Cavan – as well as legacy Anglo Irish Bank property in Boston.
Anglo Irish Bank and INBS required a combined €34.7 billion bailout before they collapsed. The IBRC liquidators have so far handed over €360 million of surplus cash to the exchequer from the wind-up. That is in addition to €1.7 billion repaid to the State for a government guarantee scheme being tapped as part of the 2013 liquidation.
The final tally will be complicated by the fact that the exchequer has also received billions of euros of gains from the Central Bank over the past decade from the sale of government bonds used in a complicated refinancing of much of the €34.7 billion rescue.
The Government is preparing a Bill that would pave the way for the conclusion of the special liquidation of IBRC and dissolution of the fellow loans-resolution vehicle, the National Asset Management Agency (Nama).
