Sir Anthony O'Reilly is a hugely ambitious man. After all, it must take a lot of ambition to head a #3 billion bid for Eircom at the same time as trying to put together a bid for the Fairfax newspaper group in Australia, which is likely to cost over #1.3 billion.
But before Sir Anthony and his backers even get down to crunching the big numbers involved in a bid for Fairfax, he will have to find some way to get around Australia's rigorous rules that restrict overseas ownership of national newspapers.
The message coming from Sydney is that despite Sir's lovebombing of Aussie prime minister John Howard, changing the media ownership regulations in an election year is seen as inconceivable. So the only way to bid for Fairfax is to use an Australian vehicle such as the APN local newspaper group, where Independent News & Media has a minority but what is effectively a controlling 41 per cent interest.
Even if the local regulators take the view that APN is sufficiently independent of its Irish 41 per cent shareholder, the harsh financial fact is that APN is only a quarter the size of Fairfax (market capitalisation of A$767 million against A$3 billion) and using APN as a bidding vehicle would require some hugely creative financial engineering.
The vibe coming from the Indo camp is that one solution would be to use some combination of APN and Indo's Wilson & Horton (W&H) subsidiary in New Zealand, although the structure of an APN/W&H entity is not immediately apparent. There are other suggestions that W&H might be sold to part-fund an APN bid for Fairfax, and many believe that Sir would be content to even dispose of gems like the New Zealand Herald if it meant he could get control of Fairfax and its three flagship titles, the Sydney Morning Herald, the Age and the Australian Financial Review.
Not on the agenda, apparently, is a merger of Indo and APN and a Sydney listing for the merged entity. This has been mooted by the Australian Financial Review, but again it's hard to see how this would get around the Aussie ownership restrictions.
At the moment, reaction in Sydney to an O'Reilly move on Fairfax is one of caution, and some fund managers have said that if Sir is really serious about Fairfax, then why didn't he go and buy the 14.9 per cent stake from Kerry Packer, instead of Packer selling that stake in the market. "It would have been a pretty easy start for them if they were going to put a transaction together," one local fund manager commented.
The Irish are supposed to be the world's biggest tea drinkers, so it's probably no great surprise that the tea business is generating buckets of money for Barry's, the tea merchants owned by former Fine Gael TD and former Minister for Foreign Affairs, Peter Barry.
The latest accounts filed with the Companies Office show that the family business had profits of more than £4 million (#5.08 million) in the year to the end of April 2000, up from £1.3 million the previous year.
Even when exceptional gains in 2000 and exceptional losses the previous year are excluded, underlying profits still rose from £2.8 million to £3.6 million. Turnover rose from £15.9 million to £17.1 million. And the Celtic Tiger has also been kind to another Irish family firm, the Denis Mahony car dealership. Profits in the year to last October almost doubled from £736,000 to £1.3 million, with sales up from £35.3 million to more than £44 million.
Current Account takes a very prissy attitude when it comes to company annual general meetings and believes that if shareholders take the trouble to turn up, then the least one expects is that the directors will also turn up, even if it means taking a tongue-lashing from shareholders who have seen their investment virtually disappear down the drain.
So it was pretty amazing to hear Oakhill chairman Martin Delany dismiss shareholders' concern at the absence of Ray McLoughin. Gerry O'Toole, Alastair McGuckian and Denis O'Brien from last week's a.g.m. with the statement: "We have apologies from them. I don't organise their private lives. I've nothing to add to that." Mr Delany, who in the past year has been a very well-paid director of both James Crean and Oakhill, should have known better.
It's not good enough that directors haven't the time or the inclination to turn up for an annual meeting that is shareholders only opportunity to express their dissatisfaction. There was plenty of dissatisfaction with Oakhill but there were few answers that gave anybody at that meeting much comfort about the long-term future of Oakhill as a public company.
One question that remains unanswered and should have been answered with a little more candour is why Donnacha Hurley quit as chief executive a couple of weeks before the a.g.m. Were there differences between Mr Hurley and the board? If there were, what were they? Maybe Denis O'Brien was pressed for time, but he still found time from his e-Island labours to invest £1 million (#1.26 million) in the recent Celtic share issue.
Maybe Ray McLoughlin, whose main contribution to Irish corporate history is to take one small company (Crean) and then divide it into two (Crean and Oakhill) even smaller companies, just at the time that the stock market was turning very sour against small companies.
It would have been nice if he had turned up last week to explain this strategy to Oakhill shareholders, but then Ray is no doubt preoccupied with his own offer to take Crean off the hands of its long-suffering shareholders.
