JP raised Westlife’s Shane up with a loan for €780k home after cash woes
WESTLIFE star Shane Filan has billionaire businessman JP McManus to thank for keeping a roof over his head, it has emerged.
The singer could not get mortgage approval after emerging from bankruptcy in 2013, so Mr McManus provided the funds. Filan, 44, went bankrupt in June 2012, when he owed Irish banks €23million after he and his brother Finbarr’s firm was placed in receivership in the previous month.
Shafin Developments Limited was involved in developments in Leitrim and Sligo but the property crash of the early 2010s impacted the company’s activities and Filan was forced to sell his home in his native Carraroe, Co. Sligo. When the singer exited bankruptcy in the UK in 2013, he approached Mr McManus, 72, whom he apparently knew from the latter’s Pro-Am golf tournaments.
The Limerick businessman provided him with a loan to buy a six-bedroom, €780,000 house on the coast in Rosses Point, Co. Sligo.
In 2015, the pop star, who was in a Sligo band called IOYOU before Westlife, sang at a retirement party for jockey AP McCoy that McManus – affectionately nicknamed ‘The Sundance Kid’ over his gambling successes – hosted at his Adare Manor resort. Filan and his wife Gillian reportedly cleared the loan from Mr McManus in 2020 and now own their Rosses Point home outright.
Gillian, 44, went bankrupt in 2018 due to the fact the couple owed €4million to Ulster Bank on a mortgage on their previous home. But the pair are now debt-free and Gillian has been granted planning permission by the local council to ‘almost double the size of the 19th-century seaside lodge with two split-level side extensions, a large garage and leisure building’.