Lynn: I paid bankers with flights and cash
Ex-solicitor tells theft trial of ‘benefits’ to lenders
FORMER solicitor Michael Lynn gave payments to bankers who lent him money, he alleged at his theft trial yesterday.
The accused said that he paid for flights and hotels for Maurice Ahern of Allied Irish Banks, and a daughter of Mr Ahern, to visit Portugal and Hungary.
‘Bankers expected benefits in kind,’ he told Dublin Circuit Criminal Court. ‘The way business was done... they [the bankers] saw you were making money and they wanted some in turn.’
Mr Lynn was asked if bank officials bought apartments from him – at which Judge Martin Nolan intervened.
‘You are saying individual bankers received money from you or your companies, directly from you and not through their bank?’ the judge asked.
‘They saw you were making money’
‘Absolutely, judge,’ replied Mr Lynn, adding that, in 2022, that might seem odd. ‘But during the Celtic Tiger, I was in my 30s and you were vying for position with the banks,’ he said. ‘When I look back, you wonder who was riding on the coat-tails of who.’
Mr Lynn, 53, of Millbrook Court, Red Cross, Co. Wicklow, is on trial accused of the theft of around €27million from seven financial institutions. He has pleaded not guilty to 21 counts of theft in Dublin between October 23, 2006 and April 20, 2007.
It is the prosecution case that Mr Lynn obtained multiple mortgages on the same properties in a situation where banks were unaware that other institutions were also providing finance.
On his fourth day being questioned by defence counsel, Mr Lynn said that he first went to London after he failed to appear at the High Court in Dublin in 2007. Before that, he said, he had meetings with bankers and with Grant Thornton to analyse his assets in Ireland and elsewhere ‘to see if we could find a commercial solution’ to his financial problems.
He said he was advised that if he went bankrupt in Ireland, he was facing bankruptcy for 12 years.
He said he talked to solicitors and to Michael Fingleton, then chief executive of the Irish Nationwide Building Society, and to Seán FitzPatrick of Anglo Irish Bank.
‘They were very concerned, and I was also very concerned in terms of myself having a future,’ said Mr Lynn.
He said he had a house rented in London and could go bankrupt in the UK for a shorter period than in Ireland, so he went there, hoping that it would ‘allow things to settle and resolve themselves’.
The court heard that in February 2008, Mr Lynn moved to Portugal and continued living there with his wife Bríd until June 2011.
The accused told the court he had first gone to Brazil in 2005 because there was a ‘natural business connection between Brazil and Portugal’.
He said his accountant friend in Portugal introduced him to a good friend in Sao Paulo, where he lived with his wife for eight months.
Hitherto, the couple had been unable to have children despite IVF treatment, the court heard. But in Sao Paulo, Mr Lynn said, they were more fortunate and had a boy. Mr Lynn said they did not like the size of the city, however, and so moved to Recife, a smaller coastal city where, with investors, he became involved in property in nearby Cabo de Santo Agostinho.
He said he got a salary from this and also earned money from teaching English.
When he was arrested, his wife was expecting again and was seven months pregnant, he told the court. He resisted extradition initially, he said.
‘I needed to give time for Bríd to give birth,’ he told defence barrister Paul Comiskey-O’Keeffe.
He said he hoped to get bail and spend time with his children but bail was denied. However, he said conjugal prison visits were allowed and they had two more children in Brazil.
The trial continues.