Actavo, the engineering services group formerly known as Siteserv, approved and paid a €10 million dividend to shareholders, including Denis O’Brien and Leslie Buckley, earlier this year.
The payment, detailed in consolidated accounts recently filed by the group, brings the total paid out to shareholders over the past two years to €20 million. It comes as the group moved to exit its events business, Actavo Events, and sell its assets to a competitor in April, initiating a collective redundancy process at that unit.
Last year, O’Brien, who owns roughly an 87 per cent stake in Actavo, and Buckley, who owns the remaining 13 per cent, received their first dividend from the group, which they acquired in 2012 from the Irish Banking Resolution Corporation, formerly Anglo Irish Bank.
The long-time business partners hold their shares in the group through Isle of Man-registered entities.
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The latest €10 million dividend, the second in as many years, was approved and paid after the group’s 2025 financial year-end date, according to the accounts.
Actavo largely shrugged off a 17.5 per cent slump in revenues last year to €162.6 million to generate a €22.9 million operating profit, up 65.2 per cent from 2024, the filings indicate.
In their report on the company’s activities, the directors said the decline in revenues related to the “completion of a number of contracts” in the previous year and efforts to “streamline” Actavo’s operations.
The filings also note that the group “commenced and completed” the sale of assets of one of its “non-core businesses” after the financial year-end date.
The Irish Times reported on Wednesday that Actavo had exited its events infrastructure business – which provided crowd control, staging and other services for concert promoters and State agencies – and sold the business’s assets to a competitor earlier this year.
While it is not clear how many jobs have been lost as a result of the exit and asset sale, the Department of Enterprise confirmed on Tuesday evening that it received a collective redundancy notification from Actavo in April. The Irish Times understands the unit employed around 40 people.
Actavo cut around 133 jobs last year, according to the latest accounts, bringing its headcount to 1,337 and slashing its wages and salaries bill by around 25 per cent to €62.5 million.
