Businessman and entrepreneur Seán Melly died aged 57 on Sunday in the care of Wicklow Hospice.
He was most recently managing director of Powerscourt Capital, a private investment company specialising in the venture capital and private equity sectors. In that role, he invested in and was non-executive director of a range of start-up high-growth businesses.
Mr Melly completed a business degree at Trinity College Dublin in 1985 and a Master’s degree in finance at UCD.
After 10 years working in finance in London and New York for groups such as Citi and the investment vehicles of both the Belzberg family and Dermot Desmond, he established a number of successful telecommunications companies in the US, Ireland and central Europe.
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Mr Melly was chairman of the board of Trinity Business School and spent many years as adjunct professor at the school teaching corporate finance on the MBA programme. He ran in the Seanad election in 2016.
He founded his own telecoms company, TCL Telecom, in the 1990s before deregulation of the sector here. TCL built up a business competing against Telecom Éireann (now known as Eir) in the business sector by providing international and long-distance telecoms services. In 1996, telecoms giant WorldCom took a 30 per cent shareholding in TCL.
A year later, WorldCom bought out the remainder of the company. Mr Melly stayed on as chief executive of the newly named MCI/WorldCom Ireland before standing down to pursue his private investments.
The most significant of these was eTel, which was founded in 1999. The company specialised in obtaining licences in the pre-liberalised central European telecoms market. It enjoyed a presence in a number of markets including Austria, Poland, Hungary, Slovakia and the Czech Republic. Mr Melly sold eTel for €100 million in 2007.
The dean of Trinity Business School, Andrew Burke, described Mr Melly as “a visionary and an entrepreneur”.
“In the classroom, Seán encouraged his students to push themselves to their full potential. He was renowned for his uncompromising and rigorous real-world teaching approach,” Prof Burke said.
“Seán invested in many aspects of college and student life and was a steadfast supporter of the university. He will be remembered as a key figure, indeed an activist, who was instrumental in emboldening the university to adopt an ambitious expansion and internationalisation of Trinity Business School.”
Mr Melly’s funeral service will be held at 11am on Friday in St Paul’s Church, Glenageary.
