Socialite fraudster Breifne O’Brien is freed from jail
‘High society con man’ ran multi-million-euro Ponzi scheme
FRAUDSTER businessman Breifne O’Brien has been released from prison, the Irish Mail on Sunday can reveal.
The former businessman was jailed for seven years in 2014 after he pleaded guilty to running a Ponzi scheme which cost his victims millions. He appealed the severity of the sentence in 2015 and lost.
But the MoS has learned O’Brien has been released on temporary release and will only be returned to prison if he comes to the attention of the authorities.
A source said: ‘He’s out and if he behaves himself he will stay out.’
A spokesman for the Prison Service said it could not comment on individual cases.
O’Brien convinced family business associates and long-standing friends from his days at Trinity College, Dublin, that he was linked to property deals in Paris, Manchester and Hamburg and a shipping insurance scheme.
O’Brien used fake letters and connections to international businessmen and lawyers to get the victims to continue to give him money.
He used the stolen cash to pay for an extension to his house, a new car for his wife and the stamp duty on new properties, in the multi-million-euro scheme.
O’Brien, 56, of Kilmore, Monkstown Grove, Co. Dublin, pleaded guilty at Dublin Circuit Criminal Court to 14 sample counts out of a total of 45 theft and deception charges at National Irish Bank and Ulster Bank, Donnybrook, Dublin, on dates between 2003 and 2008.
O’Brien, whose family home was Carrigrohane Castle, Co. Cork, had initially denied all charges and took a High Court case to try to stop his trial proceeding on the basis of adverse publicity.
The case went all the way to the Supreme Court, which ultimately ruled against O’Brien. He later changed his plea to guilty on the day his trial was due to start.
The court heard that the total loss to the five victims is €8.5m and that O’Brien owes further amounts to other creditors.
Judge Patricia Ryan said the central lie in the case was that the money given to O’Brien was not retained in his deposit account but instead used for a myriad of purposes.
She imposed a sentence of three and a half years for the deception offences and a concurrent sentence of seven years for the thefts. The maximum penalty open to the court for theft offences is ten years.
At the sentence hearing lawyers for the fraudster said that he is now destitute and is living on social welfare of €188 a week.
Defending senior counsel Patrick McGrath said O’Brien was previously described as the ‘poster boy for the worst excesses of the Celtic Tiger’, ‘Ireland’s Bernie Madoff’ and a ‘high society con man’, but is now shunned and socially ruined.
O’Brien told investors that the money would be left sitting in a deposit account in order to demonstrate that he had the financial clout to purchase investment properties and allow him to procure exclusive options on the properties. He told them he would flip these deals on for profit and split the proceeds with the investor.
Detective Sergeant Martin Griffin told the court that this was all a lie. The money was used for a myriad of other purposes instead of being held on deposit, he said.
Some of it would be used to pay back other investors who had advanced money to O’Brien, a process the detective described as ‘grooming’.
He said: ‘This is absolutely quintessentially characteristic of a Ponzi scheme’.
Det. Sgt Griffin said that the fraud followed a pattern of telling investors: ‘Give me money. I will retain it in my deposit account. It will not go anywhere else other than to show I have access to the money’.
‘He’s out and if behaves himself he will stay out’ ‘Poster boy for the worst excesses of Celtic Tiger’