When news broke that an unnamed Dublin solicitor had fled the country owing tens of millions of euro to his clients, Susan McElroy and other members of Thomas Byrne’s staff were at a wedding show at Leopardstown racecourse. One of Byrne’s sidelines was a chauffeur business and the show was a useful opportunity to showcase the company’s fleet of Bentleys and vintage cars.
McElroy, the office manager at Byrne’s Walkinstown practice, remembers first hearing the news that morning when she took a call from another of Byrne’s employees. “Do I need to come in on Monday?” he asked her, jokingly wondering whether it was Byrne who had fled. “I said, that’s nothing to do with us,” she recalls.
McElroy was right. The solicitor referred to in the reports was Michael Lynn who, it would later emerge, had allegedly borrowed huge sums of money using bogus security.
When Byrne’s practice opened the following Monday morning, however, the phones were hopping and the fax machines were in overdrive. News of Lynn’s flight had spooked the banks; now they were urgently contacting law practices, trying to track down proof of ownership of various properties on their loan books.
“Because of Lynn, the banks panicked,” McElroy recalls. “It was fax after fax after fax.”
It was towards the end of that tumultuous week that Barbara Cooney, a solicitor at Byrne's practice, discovered that her signature had been forged on a document relating to a €4.5 million loan. She reported it to the Law Society. Eight days after the Lynn news broke, Byrne's practice had been shut down and the door locks changed.
Biggest white-collar trial
The long investigation that followed led to the biggest white-collar trial to come before an Irish court. The saga drew to a close this week, when Byrne (47), Mountjoy Square, Dublin, got 12 years for fraud and theft offences totalling almost €52 million.
In an interview with The Irish Times, McElroy says she feels sorry for her former employer. "I feel he was a victim," she says. "I'm not saying what he did was right. What he did was wrong. He did steal the money, he did that to people – but I do think he was a victim."
Byrne was found guilty of transferring clients’ homes into his name and then using them to fraudulently borrow millions from six financial institutions.
He pleaded not guilty and claimed he was threatened by his former business partner, property developer John Kelly, into taking out the loans, although he did not run a legal defence of duress. The court was told that Kelly is not before the courts on any charges.
McElroy describes Byrne, who hired her in 2002, as a likeable, charming and witty man who didn’t care much what people thought of him. “The accountant called him Peter Pan – the boy that never grew up,” she recalls.
Once when she complained about being overworked, McElroy says, Byrne promptly announced she was fired. “He said to me, ‘You’re no use, you’re fired, you’re to get out.’ I said, ‘Grand’. ‘Do you know what,’ he said, ‘You’re all fired, you can all get out,’ so we all left the office. We sat on the wall in the car park, having a smoke and a chat. Next of all, the window opened. ‘Yis can come back in if you make me a cup of tea’. And he closed the window. So we all went back into the office.”
She adds: “He was so likeable. I know he was a fantasist – he did live in another world – but he was a comedian really.”
“He had a really good wit about him,” says David Byrne, who ran the chauffeur company from the Walkinstown office.
“I’m from Finglas originally. He’d ask me something and I’d give him the wrong answer. He’d say: ‘Ah you’re a f***ing philistine from the north side. I don’t know why I even have you working here.’ We’d break out laughing.”
From 2005 onwards, however, staff noticed his mood darkening. He was under increasing pressure and stress, they could see. He turned to alcohol and often wouldn’t show up until late afternoon. “You could definitely see a difference,” says David Byrne, who is not related to the former solicitor.
When the accountant at the practice died in 2005, the task of handling incoming and outgoing cheques fell to McElroy.
She knew John Kelly was a major client – he was a regular presence in the office – but the sums of money passing from Byrne to Kelly underlined it. “From 2006 onwards, it was every day and it was never less than €20-€30,000. It could be €40, €50, €80,000 sometimes.” David Byrne and McElroy say they felt intimidated by Kelly and McElroy believes Kelly had a negative influence on Thomas Byrne.
In a statement last night, Kelly’s solicitor said his client never received money from Byrne other than those properly payable to him pursuant to the solicitor-client relationship between them. He said that during previous civil proceedings in the High Court, Kelly made full discovery of his financial records, disclosing all money received by him or his companies from Byrne’s practice.
“Mr Kelly obviously rejects the scurrilous and false allegations made by Mr Byrne in his evidence, including allegations that Mr Kelly engaged in behaviour which was threatening to Mr Byrne and/or any member of his family,” the statement said. It also noted that Byrne was “unable to produce any witness or corroborating evidence supporting his allegations.”
The day Byrne’s house of cards collapsed is engraved on the memories of McElroy and David Byrne. McElroy remembers Barbara Cooney, who was praised by the trial judge this week for her bravery and courage, being distraught at the discovery of her forged signature.
“She was so upset,” McElroy recalls. “I was speechless. She came in and said to me, ‘Has Thomas ever done this before?’ I said ‘Not that I know of’ . . .
“She was panic-stricken. I didn’t know the seriousness of it, to be honest, because I didn’t understand the implications. I wasn’t a legal secretary.”
Office closed
Thomas Byrne never set foot in his practice again. By the following Monday, the office had been closed and soon the banks came looking for the cars. "I was shocked at the extent of it, but looking back at the way things were going in the office, you put two and two together then," says David Byrne.
Neither McElroy nor David Byrne has spoken to their former employer in six years. They feel sorry for his victims, yet they retain fond memories of an employer they believe was caught up in a situation that spun out of control. “I didn’t go outside the house for six months after it,” McElroy recalls. “I was afraid, and I was shattered in myself.”
