A Solicitor whinges over 71.5 million award against him and his doctor wife

Ellis Dee wrote: »

There are very few people in the world who can afford such a lavish lifestyle.:)

And, unfortunately for those of us who will have to fork out to clean up his mess, O'Donnell was never one of them. :rolleyes::rolleyes:

Thats the second or third time you've come out with that? Where exactly is he asking for anyone to clean up his mess? He's already paid back over €9 million this year. I guarantee any of the proposals he has put forward will result in the full amount being paid back but to expect him to pay back the full €70+million with 24hrs notice is just stupid and unrealistic.

Wile E. Coyote wrote: »

Thats the second or third time you've come out with that? Where exactly is he asking for anyone to clean up his mess? He's already paid back over €9 million this year. I guarantee any of the proposals he has put forward will result in the full amount being paid back but to expect him to pay back the full €70+million with 24hrs notice is just stupid and unrealistic.

And pigs will fly! Don't look up, or you know what you'll get on your face.:):):)

That promise sounds just as convincing as "There's a cheque in the post!" ROFLMA :pac::pac::pac:

Paddy De Plasterer wrote: »

@ Snakeblood.

Quote:
They struck an agreement with the bank, but this later broke down. They have told friends it was like "the shutters came down".
He already made a deal with the bank which he failed to stick to the terms of. That's why the bank went to court over it. And the bank didn't decide he had to pay back 71.5 million immediately, the judge did.

How do we know what he told the bank or what the bank said to him (apart from he telling friends). I would be better inclined to believe that if he had turned up in court and said that on the record.

It strikes me that he's as much of the truth as makes him look good. I don't see how he'd profit by saying that they struck an agreement with the bank, it'd be better for him from a PR point of view if he said the bank just wouldn't talk to him at all. So given what he's apparently trying to achieve with the article, I'm inclined to believe they had an agreement. I'm also more inclined to believe he broke the agreement because he then paid them 9.3 million after that, which the article assumes is penalties from the bank.

Granted it's a lot of waffle from the article, but those are the bits that stick out at me.

The Jaw wrote: »

Paddy De Plasterer wrote: »

@ Snakeblood.

Quote:
They struck an agreement with the bank, but this later broke down. They have told friends it was like "the shutters came down".
He already made a deal with the bank which he failed to stick to the terms of. That's why the bank went to court over it. And the bank didn't decide he had to pay back 71.5 million immediately, the judge did.

How do you know it was not the Bank who renaged on the agreement. I know for a fact that there are a number of cases where the Bank make an agreement on certain terms. Then when a new Bank Manager comes in he wants the terms of repayment changed. ( As I have said here before, a lot of Bank employees are now judged and given bonuses on their recovery of monies as opposed to the old way of bonuses on lending. The cases that I know about, this is exactly what happened. The Manager feels he/she can get a small return in the short term, which looks good on his C.V and in his pocket, so he pushed for that as opposed to full return of monies in the long term, which is what O'Donnell is promising.

The Judge did NOT say that the money had to be repaid immediately. He does not care when or how it is repaid. It is the Bank who will have insisted on that.

How do they change the terms if there's a formal agreement? I presumed it was done on more than just a handshake basis?

Edit: Googling: one of his ideas was that they send clients to him for legal work.
http://www.irishtimes.com/newspaper/finance/2011/0122/1224288086640.html
Which seems a bit... weird.

Here's a bit where he sends a letter to the bank which the judge agrees is defamatory:

Mr Gardiner said Mr O’Donnell had written to the bank last week making a number of allegations which the bank believed it was inappropriate to read in court because the claims were untrue and defamatory. Mr Justice Kelly said he had received a letter today from Mr O’Donnell and he believed the bank had acted correctly in not reading out in court the letter sent to it by Mr O’Donnell.

This is the second time they've had a judgement on the matter against them:
http://www.irishtimes.com/newspaper/finance/2011/0305/1224291372080.html

The bank claimed default of interest payments on various facilities and also alleged the couple had failed ultimately to advance acceptable proposals to address their indebtedness and that of their companies.

The bank had also claimed the couple, and companies in which they had shareholdings, had extensive additional borrowings of some €800 million with other financial institutions across several jurisdictions.

The defendants argued they had an arguable defence on various grounds, including that the bank had acted unfairly and unreasonably and in breach of fiduciary duty to them and should have given them a proper opportunity to service and refinance the various loan facilities.

Now, you can argue that the bank didn't give their plans to get out of debt enough credit, but I'm inclined to think that if the sample level was for the bank to give their non property investment business clients to support the property one, then the level of idea they had was not one I would invest in.

it isn't just the rich that are suffering. if you want somebody to blame...blame the banks.

Paddy De Plasterer wrote: »

of course the Banks are to blame as are so called regulators etc. But the likes of O Donnell with his vast legal experience should have known better. Maybe greed is the ultimate answer ?

O'Donnell was a solicitor, his wife was a doctor. If they had simply worked in their jobs they would have lived comfortable lives, never really being short of cash. Of course, that means they would have had to work long hours, and continue to do so until they reached (about) 60 years of age. They could have afforded to raise their children in comfort. Some people may have begrudged them their wealth of course, but only those people who begrudge anyone achieving more than themselves.

But they were not happy with such a life plan. They wanted more. They wanted real wealth. No harm in that, such aspirations are worthy if they lead to an honest path of acquisition.

The path they chose was to speculate in property. Unlike an artist who adds value to a lump of wood by crafting it into something beautiful and desirable, property speculators simply buy an asset (property) and hold it in the hope that when they choose to sell it they will get more than they paid (including interest payments) for it. That's quite a risk really, because in a normal market prices go up and down.

To increase the chances of the speculation yielding a sizeable profit, speculators need to acquire property on a scale that ensures the normal rules of the market are twisted in their favour. Hence if enough speculators acquire similar properties they can effectively set the price for it at sale, thereby driving up their profits. This is what happened in Ireland with office complexes, retail developments and eventually even housing estates. It was the "ordinary Joe/Josephine" who then had to pay inflated prices for their houses, inflated rents for their shops, etc while this speculation was rampant. Developers continued to build furiously, asking for increased prices in order to take their share of the bubble too. Many developers became speculators in their own properties, believing that this was the way to a faster profit than they could get from the honest path of turning stone, steel and wood into buildings.

The banks and their investors threw money onto this fire knowing exactly what it was, but fearing that if they did not extract their share of the profit somebody else would, which would leave them at a competitive disadvantage. The Regulator did not wish to get involved in the matter, preferring instead to play dumb and allow the vicious circle to continue because the resultant taxes were funding the country in the short-term and permitted a system of light taxation to continue.... much to the joy of the incumbent politicians.

One day the banks could not get hold of cash to throw onto the fire, and everyone started trying to pull their money out as quickly as they could.

Many people succeeded in getting some or all of their money out. The speculators who started it all could not, because the absence of cash in the market meant that Joe & Josephine could not borrow to pay those inflated prices for their homes.

The banks were left holding only the promise of repayments from the speculators, but those promises were based on the hugely over-valued property assets which by now could not be converted to cash because nobody could afford them.

The process of the bubble served only to transfer wealth from one large proportion of the community (house buyers, retailers, etc) to the smaller proportion of the community (speculators, banks, investors). No new value had ever been created by the speculators & investors; their lumps of wood, steel & stone were no different from when they had been bought by them. Nothing added but time, really.

So now as the bubble bursts and the piles of money unravel, how does it get re-distributed? Do Joe and Josephine get some of their cash back too?

No, in fact the middlemen (banks and investors) have their losses re-distributed to everyone, even those not involved in the game. O'Donnell, a speculator and one of the people who started the very fire that burned us is trying to avoid facing up to the risks he took when gambling his money at day one. In a fair and just society his wealth should be reduced to the level he would have had if he and his wife had simply worked in their jobs to earn their living, with perhaps some variation up or down as a gambler might have to expect. But instead he tries to hold onto the wealth he earned through no real work of his own, in the expectation that somebody else (most probably you and I) would pay off his losses.

I am not taking the communist position here. Like O'Donnell I am working a job that pays well, and when times were good I speculated a little by buying shares in companies that appeared to have a bright future. When my shares became worthless I accepted my losses and moved on. I had not borrowed to buy those shares; I just used my own savings. My family did not go hungry as a result because I had not gambled the money I would need to provide food and shelter for us. I would have been happy to take the profits had they come. I am equally happy to accept the losses, because they are mine.

O'Donnell and his ilk deserve no sympathy from us. They had more than most but wanted more than a person could spend in a lifetime of luxury. When that gamble failed we should expect them to behave responsibly and hand back the wealth to where they got it.


Z