RTE Investigates [RTE 1]

Simply, Irish Revenue require resident, domicile citizens to declare their Worldwide Income. Money taking by a Director for personal use are considered drawings/salary.

So if she has drawings form that UK company of €200,000 she would owe Revenue over €100k in tax, usc. She would get a credit for any taxed paid in the UK of same. Do you think she paid any personal tax in the UK.

She resides in Ireland, It's easier for Revenue to go after her first. Given her past Revenue fraud for VAT, I'd imagine Revenue are very interested in pursuing her.

Now I see the point , thank you.

So in essence the expenditure as seen on the bank statements if determined as personal expenditure (E Z Living in kilkemny) for example or holidays that would be classed as drawings / salary 🤔 now I get it 😏

yes, that was a 10 minute follow up, showing bank statements and tracking the money withdrawn for cars, holidays, designer clothes etc.

Fascinating thread and interesting investigations. My own tuppence worth:

To me the scam is perfectly plausible and I speak as a qualified accountant who had direct experience of dealing with distressed loans. I don’t get the victim blaming at all.

Vulture funds work exactly as described in the scam. They buy a loan at a deep discount and either the borrower can refinance a compromise figure or the Vultures foreclose. The Vultures generally work at a price of 35% of the loan or 35% of the asset value whichever is the lower. Banks will go through with these crazy deals because of the “moral danger” to functioning borrowers.. ie , as one poster put it, why would I pay my mortgage when my neighbor paid nothing for a couple of years and now he is getting 2/3rds written off?”

Knowing that, and these people seem to have been getting advice from what they thought was a barrister and being introduced to an “accountant” who was on the side of the small man as they thought, it would definitely have looked plausible. Particularly so when you get a contract saying no foal no fee drawn up by what you thought was a solicitor.

All in all it is a pretty ingenious scam with the slight drawback of no way out unless she intended running a Ponzi scheme by refunding the loudest squealers and everyone knew who she was and where she was. But that makes the scam even more plausible in my view.

yeah the scam is perfectly plausible becasue it preys on people who are desperate. Back in 2013/4 a brother of a friend of mine was going through a complete financial crash. He is a single father (wife died of cancer) and lost his job in the crash and him and his two daughters were losing the family home. I met him a few times during that period and he looked like a ghost and was riddled with depression, stress and anxiety. If someone like Catriona Carey walked into his life Ive no doubt he would have fallen for the scam, people in huge financial distress are not thinking straight and thats what these scammers are preying on. Its fine for people to say they were naive but when people are under the huge stress of losing their family home they will do anything to save it.

In the normal course of trading and things get difficult, that is true.

But for fraud like this you cannot hide behind a company.

I'd say she's already working on excuses 😏

Eh? I'm purely giving two possible ways rte got the details.

I'm not "saying so", just giving a couple of plausible possibilities.

The family had a very public split. A large amount of money went missing from DJ's company while she was there.

This led to him having to liquidate and losing an awful lot of his savings.

Tbf, Carey made a bags of things without her help. He alleged she swindled 1 million from him, but they recovered about €200000 of it. But Carey himself put himself close to ten million in debt. And left his ex-fiancee completely broke. They co-signed each other's loans, acting as guarantors to one another, thus allowing them to maximise their own personal borrowings.

When DJ's businesses (three of them, I believe) fell flat on their face, he ended up owing close to €10-15 million on the loans, but was able to negotiate repayments with his bank. She, on the other hand, wasn't so fortunate. She was left with major debts due to her co-signing on Carey's loans.

Owned a Chalet, that cost about 15 million, but then sold for 12 million, to help repay her debts. She eventually had a stroke due to the stress she was put under.

Catriona Carey was most definitely no saint, but to blame her entirely for the mess that became DJ's businesses is a stretch.

They're cut from the same cloth, and seem as dodgy as one another.

The banks have only sold some of the celtic tiger distressed loans in the last year or two. There are properties for auction on BIdx1 at this moment and the loanns were drawn down in 2004-2008 and a receiver was only appointed in the last few months. There is a long lkist of possession cases in every circuit court in the country and it is almost invariably the case that the loan is a Celtic tiger era loan.

People wouldn't have been going to Carey unless they were already in arrears and under pressure from the loan provider. When a property is in serious negative equity as many are with a deficit between market value and outstanding loan of over €100k giving the mortgage provider €35lk would be just throwing good money after bad.

She was also a director on DJs cleaning company and that investigation is forever going on....more than likely this investigation could turn out the same...these company structures must be a minefield if things turn sour

Carey wasn't planning to but the property at auction. She was ostensibly planning to buy the associated loan and only asking the homeowner to repay the amount she had supposedly paid plus interest. Something along these lines was actually done by one of the groups set up to help distressed home-owners.

I'm aware of that but was just using an example of what happens when a home is repossessed and then goes to auction.

Regardless, the scam itself would likely have left debt remaining on original mortgage on top of legal fees already built up.