CHINESE BYRNE | 

Property rental company owned by Chinese woman buys Liam Byrne’s former Dublin home

“I find it absolutely preposterous with everything that’s going on at the moment with housing that a State agency sold this much-needed proper

ty to a private company to be rented out for profit”

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A property rental company owned by a Chinese woman has emerged as the mystery buyer of gang boss Liam Byrne’s former Dublin home.

Documents obtained by the Sunday World show an application was filed with the Land Registry earlier this week for transfer of ownership of 2 Raleigh Square from the Criminal Assets Bureau (CAB) to Rosewood Crystal Management Ltd.

The company is 100 per cent owned by 44-year-old Chinese businesswoman Chunyan Ma — with the business address listed to an apartment complex in Blackrock.

Set up on June 14, 2023, it lists its principal activity as the renting and operating of its own or leased real estate.

Speaking this week, Councillor Mannix Flynn — who had urged Dublin City Council to purchase the property from CAB to help ease the city’s housing crisis — said he was extremely disappointed the three bedroom home had been sold to a company involved in private rentals.

“This property should have been handed straight back to Dublin City Council by CAB,” he said.

“It should have been made ready for social housing to help ease our housing lists.

“I find it absolutely preposterous with everything that’s going on at the moment with housing that a State agency sold this much-needed property to a private company to be rented out for profit. It’s a slap in the face to every homeless family in this city.”

Councillor Flynn said it is a fact that there are hundreds of families living homeless in Dublin who would give anything to have been offered the opportunity to live in a property like Byrne’s former home.

“For the State to behave like this, to sell a house when they are so badly needed, is completely reckless,” he continued.

“You’d have to ask whether they are even aware of what they are at.”

At a meeting of Dublin City Council held in March last year, Councillor Flynn had proposed that Dublin City Council call on CAB and the Minister for Justice to give all houses that are seized by the Bureau to Dublin City Council’s Housing Department.

In her response, Senior Executive Officer within the Council’s Housing Development section, Michelle Robinson, said then that the Council would speak to CAB about the proposed motion.

Asked this week whether Dublin City Council had tried to acquire the former gangster’s home, Cllr Flynn said, to the best of his knowledge, it had not.

“I don’t believe they ever did,” he said. “The point of the matter here is that the law allows CAB to sell off these properties to the highest bidder. But, in the particular circumstances here where the property is a former council house, there is a case to be argued that it should simply be handed straight back to the Council once it has been confiscated.

“If it’s a well-to-do property in a well-to-do estate that’s going to fetch millions and it’s out of the reach of most normal people, then that’s well and good.

“But when you have a house like this in a working-class area … it’s sickening to sell it to a private rental company.”

The application to transfer ownership to Rosewood Crystal Management Ltd was lodged by Crowley Millar solicitors on January 11.

The company was incorporated less than six months before it acquired 2 Raleigh Square from CAB in December.

The company does not have a website and when we called to its listed address this week, no-one answered the intercom.

The owner, Chunyan Ma, is also listed as a director or secretary of four other property companies set up in the Republic over the past 24 months.

These included Biueco Management Ltd, also incorporated last June, Nuhom Real Estate, incorporated in March 2023, Liliu H International Company Ltd incorporated in November 2023, and M&R Khaya Investment Ltd which was incorporated in August 2022.

Each of the companies has an authorised share capital of €100,000.

Prior to being seized by CAB in May 2021, the property had been registered to Byrne’s sister, Maria Byrne, but her brother lived there and had been paying rent through his car business, LS Active Car Sales.

The upgrades to the mobster’s home included a panic room, heavily fortified walls and a Jacuzzi.

Most of the expensive fixtures and fittings were removed before the property was handed over to CAB in May 2021. At one stage, the house was valued at over €1m.

Liam Byrne was named by gardaí in court as being at the head of a major criminal organisation dubbed the ‘Byrne Organised Crime Group’.

The gangster’s brother David Byrne was shot dead in Dublin’s Regency Hotel in February 2016 in a murder that greatly escalated the Kinahan-Hutch feud.

Under Operation Lamp, officers targeted €2.7m worth of assets including four homes worth €2m, 29 vehicles (€544,115), six designer watches (€83,750), two rings (€29,970), a bank account containing €36,760 and €34,840 in cash.

As part of their investigations, CAB officials claimed Byrne was at the “very top tier” of organised crime in Ireland.

In submissions to the High Court, CAB outlined his links to Christy ‘Dapper Don’ Kinahan’s cartel.

Byrne is currently incarcerated at HMP Wandsworth in the UK awaiting trial on charges linked to a bizarre plot to give information to police on a weapons cache in exchange for a reduced sentence for his brother-in-law Thomas ‘Bomber’ Kavanagh.