Real Madrid welcome at Carton House; Slattery returns to his roots; McKeon searches for gas; Bank to shed royal trappings
Is talk of Real Madrid return visit for real?
WHILE THE FAI and Limerick FC clash publicly over who has the right to bring FC Barcelona to Ireland for a friendly this summer, plans are under way to entice Real Madrid back here.
Platinum One, Fintan Drury’s sports events company, is hoping to bring the Galácticos back to Ireland, possibly to play a game in Athlone.
Drury pulled off a major publicity coup last year by lining up Madrid to play Shamrock Rovers at Tallaght Stadium to a sell-out crowd of 11,000, with Sky picking up the TV rights.
The match marked the Real Madrid debut of Cristiano Ronaldo, the world’s most expensive footballer. It also put Carton House, the four-star hotel near Maynooth, in the spotlight.
Not surprisingly, Frankie Whelehan, head of Choice Hotels Ireland, which manages the Kildare resort, would like the millionaires of Real Madrid to set up camp again at Carton House.
“That’s what we’re hoping,” he told me this week. “But it’s not all about Real Madrid. Last year we had the Carlow senior football team checking in as Real Madrid were checking out.
“We’ve a great relationship with Tyrone and with Tipperary, and the Irish rugby team used it there recently for training.”
Whelehan, who hails from Co Westmeath, said Carton House was trading “well ahead of last year” and “outperforming its competitive set”.
“We’ll do 100-plus weddings this year . . . it’s trading well.”
As for the Real Madrid game, sources close to Platinum One tell me talk of a return visit is a touch premature.
Flying start for Slattery
IT’S A case of back to the future for Dómhnal Slattery. With Claret Capital in cold storage, the Clare-born executive has gone back to his aircraft leasing roots with the formation of a company called Avolon.
The company yesterday said it had raised an initial $1.4 billion (€1.13 billion) including $750 million in equity capital. That’s no mean feat in the current financial climate. The Irishman has attracted some blue-chip private equity backers – Cinven, CVC and Oak Hill Capital.
The last group is led by Denis Nayden, a former chief executive of GE Capital, which took over Tony Ryan’s Shannon-based GPA after its collapse in the 1990s. Nayden will be Avolon’s chairman, something of a feather in the cap for the fledgling Dublin-based business.
Slattery is a former GPA employee and one-time head of Royal Bank of Scotland’s successful aviation arm.
All of that was before his foray into private equity investment with Claret Capital and ventures such as JetBird, the low-cost executive jet airline that remains grounded due to a lack of funding.
He was a blue-eyed boy around town in the Celtic Tiger years, gaining lavish praise in print from the likes of Merrill Lynch. The recession put the brakes on his ascent but Slattery has dusted himself down and is ready for the fray again.
Avolon has already executed contracts for the purchase of 26 Airbus and Boeing aircraft.
Other deals are in “advanced stages” of negotiation. It is also providing lease management services on a further two aircraft.
And so another aircraft leasing business based in Ireland is born and Slattery has the opportunity to rebuild his career.
McKeon explores Turkey
IRISH RESOURCE entrepreneur John McKeon, formerly of Circle Oil, is back in the game as a consultant with The Niche Group, an AIM-listed company in London.
McKeon is helping the company raise £5.68 million (€6.55 million) through a share placing at 5 pence a pop.
It’s a chunky sum for a hitherto little known company, especially given the current state of markets.
Niche plans to invest in what it describes as a “major onshore Turkish gas discovery” via a strategic investment in Oman Resources, a company in which McKeon is an executive.
Niche will provide Oman with a loan of £5.2 million, which that company will use to help it acquire a 50 per cent interest in an exploration licence in a block in south central Turkey.
The partner is a company called Arar, which estimates that the block contains 80 billion cubic feet of recoverable gas in one development project.
Followers of McKeon will be hoping he repeats the trick at Circle, where he secured a £19 million investment from a fund set up by Libyan ruler Col Muammar Gadafy before taking his leave of the business shortly afterwards.
McKeon, along with Towfik Al Swaidi, a fellow member of Oman’s executive team, are investing €250,000 between them in the placing. This placing will generate plenty of noise for Niche and Oman. Time will tell if the investment stacks up.
Bank preparing to offload its 'Camelot' legacy
IT IS all change at Bank of Ireland. It has moved to a new head office, is selling all its art and is preparing to offload a number of businesses to comply with a ruling by the European Commission.
This week, Bank of Ireland governor Pat Molloy told its extraordinary general court (that’s the fancy title that it uses for a meeting) that the bank would seek to shed the unwieldy titles of “governor” and “court” – a hangover to its establishment by Royal Charter in 1783.
Shareholder Pat Hegarty said that the titles sounded “like something from Camelot” and should be dropped.
Molloy said that the bank informally uses the terms chairman and meeting, but it did not have a mechanism by which it could change its status.
New company legislation will allow it to convert into a normal plc, he added.
LITTLE THINGS
EXECUTIVES FROM London-listed Source BioScience were in town this week to look at potential new premises for its lab testing.
The company set up here in late January and has two staff in a lab at St James’s Hospital in Dublin as part of a joint initiative with Trinity College Dublin.
This facility carries out DNA sequencing and Source BioScience says it offers quicker results at a cheaper rate to universities and others operating in this area.
At present, samples are sent to Germany and Korea for testing.
Source BioScience has a market cap of £15 million (€17.4 million), made a modest profit last year and has money in the bank.
“We want to do something bigger and better here,” said Nick Leaves, the company’s operations director. “I think in a year’s time we’ll be in a different space and have about five people here.”
Congratulations to Michael Dawson and the 80-plus cyclists who raised €40,000 through their Cycle4Haiti charity ride from Galway to Dublin on the May bank holiday weekend.
