Donal Kinsella. Irish legal system. Libel awards crazy

Sceala Philosopher Location: Carlow

I like to read Kerrin's views. He is right about our legal system needing a total overhaul. We have the most corrupt compo legal system in Europe. Most of our laws are based on old British laws for the rich and friends of the rich.

Old man gets 10 million euro -for sleep walking naked- three times, to a younger womans hotel room.
Our compo culture has finally gone into the stratosphere of crazy payouts.
The jury in the case of a Co Louth man taking a libel action against his former employers after an incident in which he was sleep walking naked has awarded him €10m in damages.

Donal Kinsella sued mining company Kenmare Resources after the company issued a press release in 2007, which he claims insinuated he was guilty of making inappropriate sexual advances to company secretary Deirdre Corcoran while on a business trip in Mozambique.

Lawyers for Mr Kinsella told the jury today that the press release would mean to an ordinary person that 'something juicy' was going on in the jungle and that Mr Kinsella had tried to 'jump the company secretary'.

In May 2007, the 67-year-old from Dunleer was on a business trip in Mozambique.
He appeared naked three times at the bedroom door of Ms Corcoran during the night.
The court heard that he had been drinking and taking pain killers and had a habit of sleep walking and not wearing pyjamas.
Ms Corcoran later complained and an investigation was carried out by a solicitor who found that Mr Kinsella was simply sleep walking.
After an inquiry from the editor of the Irish Daily Mirror, John Kierans, the company issued a press release in July 2007. Mr Kinsella said the press release defamed him.
Lawyers for the company told the jury today that it had tried to sort out the problem amicably.
Mr Kinsella had been asked to step aside as the chairman of the company's audit committee so that Ms Corcoran would not have to have one-to-one contact with him.
But Senior Counsel Oisín Quinn said Mr Kinsella could not understand another person's point of view.
He said there was no malice in the press release that had been issued.
He said the company behaved properly in difficult circumstances that were not of its own making.

Lawyers for Mr Kinsella urged the jury to award his client big damages and said the company had aggravated matters by accusing Mr Kinsella of being a liar and a perjurer.

I wonder did the jury read about Donal Kinsella.
His previous form is interesting.

Wheeler-dealer strikes gold again
John Mulligan
Donal Kinsella has business and Fíanna Fáil in his blood. That combination has ensured that he made the headlines but also courted his share of controversy

DONAL Kinsella is one of those guys who works hard to make things go his way. There are the inevitable tales of how the gregarious 60-year-old Fíanna Fáil supporter, who last week was the centre of a controversy over a land rezoning in his home town of Dunleer in Co Louth, made his first big killing.

It was, so the story goes, during the long bank strike in the early 1970s when Kinsella first struck gold. It seems he got a funny inkling about Tara Mines and began to buy up stock. With bank officials busy parading with placards, there was no-one to clear cheques, which stockbrokers at the time were still happy to accept.

So, without having to come up with cash, Kinsella was able to build a sizeable stake in the exploration company.

When months later the bank strike ended, he sold up, making a profit believed to be over £100,000 at the time, enough to really kick-start a business career when £3,000 could buy you a semi-detached house in Dublin. It was a canny piece of financial engineering.

But business was already in his blood. His father owned a butchers shop next to an old RIC barracks - a barracks where Kinsella's grandfather sat as a judge in 1922. When the barracks was condemned in 1946 Kinsella's parents, John and Nancy, began building a new premises on the site and in 1950 opened a pub, restaurant and shop there.

It was the first incarnation of what would be known as the Grove. When he graduated from UCD in 1968, Kinsella took over the running of the family business and two years later decided to add a ballroom onto the building. It transformed the Grove and made it was a big success in the 1970s and 1980s.

A few years after the ballroom was up and running, Kinsella was getting more fingers in pies, not least in Tara Mines. In coming years he would be criticised, involved in controversy, named as a "fat cat" in the Dáil, (surely Ireland's first) removed by shareholders from one company board, but still standing at the end of it all.

Teeling move It was in 1977 that Kinsella met for the first time a legend of Irish business, John Teeling.

Teeling had bought a stake in a Drogheda company, Irish Oil and Cake Mills, a manufacturer of edible oils which had been on the go since at least the 1930s. One of Kinsella's friends, Peter McAleer, brought Kinsella on board and he stumped up cash to keep the company going. It wouldn't last too long. Teeling sold out in 1979 and the company ultimately went bust (Kinsella now owns the site).

For another 18 years Kinsella and Teeling would work on various projects together, courting controversy as they went.

In 1979 Teeling, Kinsella and other investors took control of a large clothing manufacturer, CP Gentex (General Textiles).

Soon after they took control, incumbent management reportedly attempted to put the company into receivership.

Their bid failed. Kinsella was appointed chairman and Teeling managed the company from 1979 to 1981.

Most of the assets were sold off, with most of the factories closed. AIB, which had financed the takeover, probably fared the best out the whole affair. It was owed millions of pounds and recouped much of that. Politically, the episode was a contentious one, and ultimately all that was left was two manufacturing assets.

One, Trimproof, is based in Trim, County Meath and is today fully owned by Kinsella. A small fabric manufacturer, its latest accounts for the 12 months to the end of June 2002 show that it made a gross profit of over ?2.7m and a profit after tax of ?333,000. In the previous 12month period it made an after-tax profit of ?324,000.

The 1970s and 1980s were the peak of Teeling's career as a corporate raider. Glen Abbey, another textiles firm, was one of his targets and Kinsella was on board for that one too. Teeling made three assaults on the firm between 1979 and 1983.

But Dublin Gas was to be Kinsella's first big foray into the corporate league. It would also provide a salutary lesson on when not to be left holding the baby. The man who is rumoured to fancy splashing out on a bottle of champagne when times are good, was probably sipping a few of the Smithwicks he tends to prefer when they're somewhat leaner.

Dublin Gas was an astonishing debacle that led one government cabinet minister, the late Frank Cluskey, who was a former leader of the Labour Party, to resign in 1983 in protest over the government policy on the terms of agreement for the supply of gas from Kinsale to the company. He claimed the agreement offered all the advantages to the shareholders, but none to the state.

The shareholders included Teeling and Kinsella. They had bought into the company cheap, despite the fact that tens of millions of pounds had been pumped into it by the government.

"When Mr Kinsella was storming Dublin Gas neither he nor the people associated with him were doing that for a company which could have been bought lock, stock and barrel for £1.5m, " said Cluskey in 1986. "This is the company to which the government gave £126m of taxpayers' money.

We are now told that the company and the fat cats who got their hands on Dublin Gas have come back to the government to ask for more taxpayers' money in the form of a reduction in the price their gas supply.

"It is hard to take seriously the deal which Fíanna Fáil made with Dublin Gas, " he continued. "Political opportunism is all that really counts." Banks (which owned 25% of the company) had stopped funding Dublin Gas in 1985, while by 1986 Bórd Gáis hadn't been paid for the gas it supplied.

Kinsella had bought into Dublin Gas along with Teeling a few years previously, hoping to make a fortune. As one Fine Gael TD, Liam Skelly, remembered later: "There was a grab-all approach to Dublin Gas, especially from the point of vested interests who thought they were going to get their hands on a virtual gold mine and who thought they were going to print themselves money from then until the end of the century." But while Teeling sold his stake early on, Kinsella held on to the bitter end, eventually losing the vast majority of his investment in the gas firm. A receiver was put into the company and it was eventually nationalised.

Whiskey on the rocks By 1987 Kinsella was back on board with Teeling, joining the latter's new venture at Cooley Distillery in Louth.

But Cooley would provide yet another colourful episode in Kinsella's business career.

Like Paul Power, the longtime friend of Teeling who last week was voted off the Cooley board at the agm, Kinsella also found himself parting company with Teeling after being ousted.

It had followed a difficult time at Cooley and a proposed ?28m takeover of the whiskey producer by Irish Distillers that was eventually blocked by the Competition Authority. In an almost mirror image of last week's events, Teeling used his voting power to get rid of Kinsella following his continuing insistence that the company should be sold off.

Teeling was having none of it, and Kinsella, his long time fellow corporate raider, was history. He was seeking to sell his 12% holding at over ?2.28 per share. It is understood he received considerably less when Cooley itself later bought the stock.

And since 1994 things got a little quieter for Kinsella, chairman of the south Louth cumann of Fíanna Fáil. He had joined the board of exploration firm Kenmare Resources, and remains its deputy chairman. He attempted to sell the Grove in 2000 for ?1.27m, but he apparently still owns the premises. It is being operated now by a couple from Armagh.

Succeeding in having his land rezoned in Dunleer, much to the dismay of many locals and politicians, is unlikely to be his coup de grace.

The land is worth a fortune and he wants to start building on it. But he still faces many obstacles, not least of which is that the rezoning may be referred to An Bórd Pleanála.

Yet the race horse trainer and owner is a betting man by nature, and he'll be gambling that he'll win by a nose.
September 21, 2003
https://www.tribune.ie/archive/article/2003/sep/21/wheeler-dealer-strikes-gold-again/

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Donal Kinsella. Irish legal system. Libel awards crazy