Speculation continues regarding the possible use of the St. John’s House site at Tallaght, county Dublin.
As reported by Gript’s Fatima Gunning on Monday, the Department of Children. Equality, Disability, Integration and Youth confirmed that “IPAS is responding to an offer of accommodation made in respect of this property,” and that an assessment of suitability will be made once the owners submit details of works completed.
As in other cases where premises and sites were once used for purposes more beneficial to the local community and economy, the owners of the St John’s House site are worth having a closer look at.
It is owned by a company called Kintrona Limited who are based in Cork and some of whose principals have already benefited from asylum accommodation supply.
The three directors of the company are David Kelly, Tony O’Neill and John Crean. Kelly and Simon Kelly are also directors of Kintrona Holdings which has an address at Lucan, County Dublin.
John Crean is a director of Next Week which has drawn down millions in payments for asylum accommodation provided. In fact, it received €6,678,051 in the last quarter of 2023 alone.
A former director of Kintrona, Brendan Moran, was until December 2020 a director of Aperee – the nursing homes company whose former homes at Callan and elsewhere have been the subject of speculation regarding future use. The former owner of Aperee, David O’Shea, was also a Kintrona director until November last year.
The three owners of Kintrona Limited with equal shares are City Quarter Capital, Lebrun Private and Red Quartz.
City Quarter is wholly owned by Sanne Nominees which is owned by the Apex Group which itself is wholly owned by Sanne (UK.) Lebrun Private is 85% owned by Cathal Fitzgerald. Red Quartz is owned by Patrick Kelly, Simon Kelly, David Kelly and Christopher Kelly.
Kintrona Holdings is jointly owned by Neix Limited and Woleseja Limited. There is no shareholder information on Neix and the only director registered with the Companies Registration Office (CRO) is David Kelly. It was established on August 23, 2023.
The secretary of Neix is Millbank Trustees which is wholly owned by Carol Dwyer who you may recall from previous appearances as a director of Seefin Events, Airways Centre Limited, Burvea Unlimited and Gateway Integration Unlimited, all of which have lucrative contracts with the Department of Children, Equality, Disability, Integration and Youth (DCEDIY) for the provision of asylum accommodation in such places as East Wall, Santry, Ballsbridge and Kippure Estate.
Dwyer and Sinéad Fennelly are listed as directors of another company called Edgewell which is the sole owner of Gateway Integration, the company which runs the East Wall centre, and of Airways Centre which has the Santry centre.
Edgewell is itself wholly owned by a company called Bergvon LP Inc. However, you will search in vain for who the beneficial owner or owners of Bergvon, and therefore all of the companies which are drawing down payments here, are because it is registered in the Isle of Man, and we have been unable to find out that information.
Burvea, which manages Ballsbridge, has not yet shown up on the list of payments to those companies but, as we had noted in January, the other three Dwyer connected companies which are also connected to Quanta Capital and Goldstein Properties through the various principals, had already taken in more than €17 million for asylum accommodation by the end of June 2023.
That figure has since been boosted by a further €18,600,000 to bring the total so far to over €35 million. It is not difficult to see how Kintrona might have been tempted to move into this lucrative area by offering St. John’s as an IPAS centre rather than attempting to rent out office space.
Likewise, Dwyer and Millbank Trustees, with their Midas touch, hardly need to make too strong a case in enticing new investors into an area which has proven to be a boon to “capitalists” native and foreign.
Woleseja, the other shareholder in Kintrona Holdings, also enjoys the services of Millbank Trustees and the only director listed with the CRO is Simon Kelly. Woleseja was established on August 21 last year and there is no shareholder information listed.
On February 16, 2024, Kintrona Limited registered with the CRO a C1 charge or mortgage with Mount Street Hibernia Servicing Limited for “ALL THAT AND THOSE the hereditaments and premises known as St. John’s House, Blocks 8 and 9, Tallaght Retail Centre, Tallaght, County Dublin being all the property comprised in Folio DN182478L County Dublin HELD under an Indenture of Lease dated 31 July 1996 between (1) Docfield Limited (2) Wingmount Trading Limited and (3) Anglo Irish Bank Corporation Plc.” Kintrona is listed with the Land Registry as the sole owner of the site since December 5, 2022.
Crean and Kintrona’s other interest in the asylum sector is through Crean’s directorship of Peppard Investment Holdings which owns Zurich House in Blackrock which currently houses persons claiming asylum.
Peppard Holdings is based at the same Cork address as Kintrona and is jointly owned by Peppard Investments and Arderin Investments. Peppard Investments trousered €754,225 in the last three months of 2023, bringing their total take for asylum accommodation for the year to over €1 million.
There is no ultimate ownership registration for Peppard Investments, but Crean wholly owns Arderin. He is also a director of Prospect Financial Holdings which was established last month but we have yet to see what line they might apply themselves to.
All of this is a bit like opening one of those Russian dolls because there is always something else inside – with the difference that there appears to be nothing at the centre of many of the principal entities who are involved in making huge amounts of money from asylum accommodation here.
Perhaps a better analogy is the box containing Schrodinger’s Cat, or Forrest Gump’s box of chocolates, as you never know what you might find.