Irish News

Hunt still on for millions stolen by disgraced ex-solicitor Michael Lynn

07/01/2025

The hunt for millions of euros stolen by convicted conman Michael Lynn is continuing, a new two-part RTÉ documentary series has revealed.

Ahead of his trials, Lynn, a solicitor and property developer who had been working in Dublin, was tracked down through Portugal and Bulgaria to a prison in Brazil by Irish Mail on Sunday journalist Michael O’Farrell and photographer Sean Dwyer.

In episode one of Michael Lynn: The Fugitive which aired on RTÉ on Monday night, the pair told of their attempts to follow the money trail and solve the unanswered question: where did it all go?

When Lynn fled Ireland in December 2007, he had clocked up €80million in loans from high street banks, much of them fraudulently secured via multiple mortgages. He also owed another €12million to private investors who had paid out for unbuilt apartments abroad. The documentary highlights new links involving a Bulgarian business associate of Lynn’s, who has set up companies in Ireland relating to property development. It also shows Lynn’s wife, Bríd Murphy, withdrawing cash from those company accounts in the last year, during his second trial.

Lynn was convicted in December 2023 of stealing almost €18million from various banks.

He was later jailed for five-and-a-half years.

‘IT’S A STORY THAT DOESN’T WANT TO DIE’

He is also the subject of an ongoing Garda money-laundering inquiry, which could land him with a further sentence of up to 14 years if found guilty. In June last year, he was granted legal aid for an appeal, after telling a court that he has ‘no means’.

Mr O’Farrell – who wrote a book about the scandal, titled Fugitive: The Michael Lynn Story – said that one year ago this week, the Bulgarian business associate, Yavor Poptoshev, was arrested during raids on his house and Lynn’s house. He told the RTÉ documentary: ‘Weeks after Michael Lynn is in prison in Ireland, we’re still standing on a hillside in Brittas, Co. 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?’

Documents uncovered by Mr O’Farrell and Mr Dwyer 17 years ago are still relevant to what is happening today. After Lynn fled to Portugal, the pair spotted someone tearing up documents and leaving them outside Lynn’s offices one night.

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They pieced them back together and found a treasure trove of information on Lynn.

Mr Dwyer said: ‘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.’

‘HE’D TAKEN MILLIONS FROM PEOPLE’

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

The documents showed he had a new company called Vantea, which had shares owned by anonymous companies across the world. His assets were disappearing into this secret void, the documentary heard.

Mr Poptoshev was one of the names in those documents.

Mr O’Farrell continued: ‘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.

He said: ‘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 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, Co. Kerry, said: ‘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… 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.’

Responding to queries from The Irish Mail on Sunday, Lynn’s Irish solicitor said his client’s position was that he denied stealing from any individuals.

Meanwhile, Lynn’s Brazilian legal team maintained that others – and not Lynn – had misappropriated various assets belonging to creditors. They also indicated for the first time that some properties in Bulgaria ‘remain held in trusts for the benefit of the legitimate investors’ once legal issues are resolved.

And they insisted that ‘no misappropriation of funds had taken place’ by Lynn.