Seven homes and €18k a month rent
MoS reveals former RTÉ CFO has €3m mortgage-free portfolio
RTÉ’S former chief financial officer Richard Collins owns a €3 million mortgage-free property investment portfolio, the Irish Mail on Sunday can reveal.
Mr Collins, who famously could not remember the details of his own RTÉ salary at an Oireachtas committee last year, owns at least seven investment properties in Dublin, which can generate an estimated annual combined rent of more than €200,000.
Property records confirm Mr Collins’s properties, which all located in soughtafter areas in south Dublin, are listed as
‘I don’t know my salary off the top of my head’
rentals and are likely to be generating monthly rent-roll in excess of €18,000 – or €219,000 a year.
Mr Collins emerged as a key figure in the controversy relating to secret payments to former Late Late Show host Ryan Tubridy.
He resigned last October after he endured a few torrid appearances before Oireachtas committees.
The most memorable of these was when Mr Collins enraged TDs when he told them: ‘I don’t know what my exact salary is off the top of my head.’
After initially tying to argue his publicly-funded salary was a ‘private matter’, he later clarified: ‘I believe my salary is around €200,000 plus a car allowance of €25,000, but it’s in and around that.’
Mr Collins was pulled back into the spotlight this week after it emerged he and Rory Coveney – a brother of Enterprise Minister Simon Coveney – received severance payments when they exited the national broadcaster.
It also emerged Mr Collins’s predecessor, Breda O’Keeffe, was given a €450,000 golden handshake redundancy package that was not approved by RTÉ’s executive board.
Now aged 59, Mr Collins does not appear to have taken on a new job since leaving RTÉ.
However, an analysis of property records shows he remains in control of a substantial real estate investment portfolio.
In addition to his family home in Booterstown – which is worth as much as €680,000 – Mr Collins owns at least another seven properties worth €3.3 million.
Five of these are owned jointly with 51-year-old businesswoman Anne Fleming, who shares Mr Collins’s home address.
Ms Fleming is the finance director
for Crownway Investments, a private equity vehicle which owns the Bord Gáis Theatre.
Another two properties, which were purchased decades ago by Mr Collins and his late wife Lynda, are now in his sole name.
Lynda Collins, a daughter of former TD and Dublin Lord Mayor, Fergus O’Brien, was tragically killed by a falling tree in 2011 as she walked home on Dublin’s Waterloo Road.
Lynda was 45 when she died and a mother to three children she had with Mr Collins.
Her father, who died in 2016 before his son-in-law joined RTÉ, was a loyal supporter of Garret FitzGerald and was a TD from 1973 to 1992.
All of the investment properties currently owned by Mr Collins are mortgage free and are listed with the Residential Tenancies Board as rentals.
As RTÉ’s chief financial officer, Mr Collins is one of a handful of key figures in last summer’s payments scandal.
Prior to joining RTÉ in January 2020, he had held senior financial positions at Dunnes Stores and Superquinn.
By the time he joined the national broadcaster, the controversial payments to Ryan Tubridy had already been agreed and secretly funnelled through the now infamous barter account and Mr Collins knew nothing about them.
It was Mr Collins’s decision to move the barter account balance onto RTÉ’s main accounts for the first time that led to the deception unravelling when auditors questioned the figures.
However, under Mr Collins, the barter account balance was simply posted into the main accounts at year end, rather than forming any part of RTE’s monthly management accounts.
Before he resigned, Mr Collins admitted to the Oireachtas that this omission, which allowed the barter account transactions to remain obscured, amounted to inadequate oversight.
He also admitted he unquestioningly accepted former director general Dee Forbes’s attempt to pass off the payments as Covid consultancy payments for Mr Tubridy’s agent, Noel Kelly.
This failure to question why a talent agent was supposedly providing Covid advice represented a missed opportunity to discover the irregular financial mechanisms which occurred at RTÉ.
‘He does not appear to have taken on a new job’