New RTÉ Documentary Michael Lynn: The Fugitive asks Where did the money go?

Documentary series reveals Michael Lynn’s wife withdrawing cash from bank accounts by Bulgarian business associate of his, during trial

 Small individual Irish investors tell of their suffering: 

• Paul Ryan – Retired Teacher: “You’d wake up at night and suddenly it would hit you that you had lost this money for your family” 
• Sean O’Mahony – Publican:  “A walking conman, that’s the way I would describe Michael Lynn”

Watch here

One of the loose ends that still exists with the Michael Lynn story is the question of what happened with the money. Virtually none of which has been recovered. When solicitor Michael Lynn fled Ireland in December 2007, he’d clocked up €80m in loans from high street banks, much of them fraudulently secured via multiple mortgages. And he owed another €12m to private investors who had paid out for unbuilt apartments abroad.

A new two-part documentary series beginning on RTÉ One and RTÉ Player tonight, highlights new links involving a Bulgarian business associate of Michael Lynn’s setting up companies in Ireland relating to property development, and those company accounts being accessed by Mr Lynn’s wife, Brid Murphy withdrawing cash in the last year.

Michael Lynn: The Fugitive reveals the true story of an epic hunt to bring one of Ireland’s most notorious fugitives to justice told directly by the reporter who tracked him down, his victims, and former employees. The two-part series is directed by Trevor Birney and produced by Fine Point Films for RTÉ.

Irish Mail on Sunday Journalist Michael O’Farrell and photographer Sean Dwyer ended up hunting Michael Lynn down all over the world, from Portugal to Bulgaria to a hellhole prison in Brazil. Michael Lynn was facing serious questions about his fraudulent actions in Ireland when he fled to Portugal. They spotted someone tearing up documents and leaving them outside Lynn’s offices in Portugal one night. When they got them back to the hotel and pieced them together, it was a treasure trove of information on Lynn. They had discovered a cache of discarded documents in Portugal which led them deeper into Lynn’s labyrinth of lies.

Sean Dwyer: “You couldn’t have asked for a better map of how Lynn had stitched together his business over the previous 12 months and how he was planning to roll it out over the next several years.”

Michael O’Farrell: “I could see bank transfers and cheques being signed, €20,000 going here. I could see handwritten documents detailing €3million and €4 million worth of transfers from his client account into strange places.”

The documents explained that Vantea was his new company with a new shareholding structure owned by anonymous companies in strange parts of the world that you couldn’t trace. Everywhere he went, his assets were disappearing into this secret void.

The documents uncovered by Journalist Michael O’Farrell back 17 years ago are still relevant to what’s happening today.

One of the names in those documents was a Bulgarian man Yavor Poptoshev. Journalist Michael O’Farrell has seen that name pop up in Slovakia on company documents with Brid Murphy (wife of Micheal Lynn), in the Seychelles, and more recently, and intriguingly, in Ireland. It was a name that only began to be connected during the trial when it was realised that Michael Lynn had moved house and the new house, according to the land registry documents, had been bought by a company associated with Mr. Poptoshev in Ireland. 

When Michael O’Farrell investigated Mr. Poptoshev a little bit deeper, he learnt he has set up various other companies in Ireland, which are engaging in property developments. They appeared to be back in business. During Michael Lynn’s second trial, his wife Brid Murphy was accessing those company accounts via ATM machines while he was on legal Aid. All of that is still the focus of a Garda money laundering investigation.

One year ago this week, Mr. Poptoshev was arrested during dawn raids on his house and Michael Lynn’s house. Michael O’Farrell tells the RTÉ documentary: “Weeks after Michael Lynn is in prison in Ireland, we’re still standing on a hillside in Brittas County Wicklow at dawn watching the guards raid his wife’s house. So in some ways, it’s like a story that doesn’t want to die. But that’s because the life of the story is what happened to the money?”

Viewers will hear for the first time the recording of Michael Lynn admitting :  “I was on my own personal drugged up ambition, fuelled by the desire to succeed. I was the Celtic Cub.” It’s still the only time that we can hear Michael Lynn’s voice in public, because the interview he agreed to do that day is the only interview he’s ever given publicly.

16 years after he failed to show up to a special High Court hearing to be questioned about his property dealings, the former solicitor, Michael Lynn, was imprisoned in December 2023 after being convicted of stealing almost €18 million from financial institutions.

Journalist Michael O’Farrell: “When Michael Lynn ran, the trail of destruction he left in his wake started to emerge pretty quickly. It was obvious that the banks had a problem, but what wasn’t immediately clear was that he’d also taken millions from hundreds of ordinary people.”

Paul Ryan a retired PE Teacher from Dublin paid a deposit to buy an apartment in Portugal: “Michael Lynn stole roughly €60,000 from me. I didn’t discuss it with my family or my daughters because I felt a terrible sense of guilt that I had lost all this money.  The apartment… the dream was retirement. Our family could come and visit or we can all meet. That was a dream.”

“What you call the legal system in the state didn’t seem to have any interest in what the small person had lost in this particular aspect. It was all about banks.”

Sean O’Mahony a Publican from Killarney in Kerry told the RTÉ documentary: “Michael Lynn stole up to €50,000 from me and my family. Early in 2000 unfortunately, my wife got cancer. I took my own voluntary redundancy so that I could stay at home full time with her. I came across the company Kendar through a friend of mine who was an auctioneer at the time. And my wife, she got a voluntary redundancy and she wanted to invest that in a property abroad so our two girls would remember her going forward.” 

“It was an awful time in our life. But to think that we had to deal with a situation like Michael Lynn as well. We wrote to the president. We wrote to the Taoiseach. We wrote to the Department of Justice. We wrote to everyone possible to see could we get help. But unfortunately, we were ignored.”

ENDS

Date: Monday 06 January 2025

RTÉ Communications: Laura Fitzgerald