HOSPICE GIFTED €250K HOUSE - SOLD IT FOR €37K
Spanish home willed to charity by dying woman
A PUBLICLY funded hospice sold a €250,000 Spanish property it had received as a gift for a fraction of its value, the Mail on Sunday can reveal.
Our Lady’s Hospice (OLH) in Harold’s Cross should have made hundreds of thousands of euro after it was bequeathed the Costa Del Sol home in 2008.
But instead, the hospice took five-anda-half years to sell the poolside property – and sold it for so little that the charity
actually lost €32,203 in the process. The loss was incurred because in the half decade it took to sell the home for just €37,500, OLH paid out €69,703 in management fees and other bills, often without adequate invoices to back the payments up.
The home was later the subject of a HSE audit that found it had a value of €250,000 at the time it was sold.
Disposing of it was the responsibility of OLH’s then head of finance, Denis Maguire.
Mr Maguire was dismissed for ‘serious misconduct’ and ‘serious negligence’ in September 2016 following an independent investigation and an internal disciplinary procedure. He has since been arrested and questioned by gardaí investigating the sale.
The hospice has now launched a High Court case against him. Mr Maguire, meanwhile, has recently transferred his family home into the sole ownership of his wife and sold a number of other assets.
The Spanish property, in a gated community called Aloha Lake Village, is near Marbella in the hills above the luxury Puerto Banus marina. The community of 45 houses boasts three communal swimming pools, overlooks a mountain lake popular for family picnics, and is surrounded by several golf courses.
According to Spanish property records, No.14 Aloha Lake Village was purchased by Irish woman Agnes Phelan for €364,000 in 2004. Mrs Phelan left the home to the hospice when she died in October 2008.
Responsibility for managing the sale of the Spanish asset then fell to Mr Maguire.
As head of finance, Mr Maguire was the company secretary of OLH’s corporate entity, Our Lady’s Hospice & Care Services Ltd.
This firm receives circa €25m from the HSE each year as well as millions more from public fundraising and donations.
The sale of the Spanish property became the focus of a HSE audit after a whistleblower expressed concerns about financial affairs at OLH a number of years ago. That audit found that the Aloha Lake Village home had never been placed on the open market by OLH, resulting in ‘a perceived unfair advantage or closed opportunity to the buyer’.
The audit concluded: ‘The property was neither sold at market value nor was it made available on the open market and therefore lacks transparency and may be perceived as failing the arms-length test and significantly reducing funds available to OLH.’
As a result, the hospice has now implenow a conflict-of-interest register for all executives and staff. According to the audit, there was ‘no independent valuation sought at any time’ for the Spanish property and there was ‘no evidence of business planning for the expenditure’ incurred.
The audit found that in 75% of cases a simple request for payment resulted in funds being paid out for the Spanish home, even though invoices and purchase orders had not apparently been received.
Furthermore, because of the way the Spanish asset was accounted for, the audit team said it ‘cannot be sure all costs associated with this inheritance have been captured’.
This means the loss incurred by the charity could be higher than the €32,203 estimated by the audit.
There was also ‘no evidence in board minutes of any plan to hold on to the property until the market improved… nor was there any evidence of an agreement by the board to sell the property at the time when the sale took place.’
In the half decade that the hospice retained the home, Mr Maguire travelled to Spain on expenses six times, incurring bills of €3,620, the audit explains. Mr Maguire’s wife, Deirdre, accompanied him on five of these trips but the couple paid for her flights themselves.
The majority of these expense cheques were signed off by Mr Maguire himself and the then head of HR Audrey Houlihan, who has become CEO. One claim cheque was signed by Mr Maguire and then CEO Mo Flynn, who is now heading up Rehab, according to the audit.
It is against hospice rules for a manager to approve and sign their own expense claims. Contacted this week, former CEO Ms Flynn said: ‘I was never a cheque signatory while CEO of Our Lady’s Hospice. My remit involved approval of expenses accrued by senior staff in the normented mal course of their duties.’ The hospice has put in place new rules to ensure expenses claims must be authorised by two independent signatures. An OLH spokeswoman said this week: ‘As this matter has
Firm gets €25m from HSE and millions in donations
already been in the public domain and is subject to Garda investigation, we are unable to comment any further at this time.’
When certain details from the audit previously emerged in late 2017 and early 2018, a hospice statement was released: ‘While the majority of the audit’s recommendations focus on historical matters during 2006-2015, we have worked systematically through the findings. They have demonstrated that the financial controls in place at that time were not sufficiently comprehensive.
‘For that, the Board and Management offers an unreserved apology. Our current Management and Board of Directors have fully taken this on-board and acted immediately to enhance our financial procedures.’