Denis O’Brien

Explore about the Famous Businessperson Denis O’Brien, who was born in Ireland on April 19, 1958. Analyze Denis O’Brien’s net worth, age, bio, birthday, dating, height-weight, wiki. Investigate who is Denis O’Brien dating now? Look into this article to know how old is Denis O’Brien?

Denis O’Brien Biography

Denis O’Brien (born 19 April 1958) is an Irish billionaire businessman, and the founder and owner of Communicorp. He was listed among the World’s Top 200 in 2015 and is also Ireland’s richest native-born citizen. His business interests also extend to aircraft leasing (Aergo Capital), utilities support (Actavo), petroleum (Topaz Energy, until 2016), and football (soccer), being a minority shareholder of Celtic F.C.. O’Brien was implicated by the Moriarty Tribunal as having improperly influenced the decision to award a mobile phone license to the Esat Digifone consortium, which he chaired.

He studied politics, history and logic at University College Dublin, graduating in 1977. After winning a scholarship from Boston College while attending UCD, he completed an MBA in corporate finance there in 1982. Upon his return to Dublin, he was employed as an assistant manager in a local bank, but left that job and became a personal assistant to Tony Ryan, owner of an aircraft leasing company.

O’Brien is the owner of Communicorp, a media holding company operating across Europe. He started the company in Ireland in 1989, where it has owned independent radio stations like Newstalk and Today FM. The company expanded to markets in Eastern European countries, later selling some of its stations to local operators. In 2014, Communicorp expanded to the United Kingdom, acquiring eight radio stations across the country; in 2017, Communicorp moved its UK radio stations to a new independent company, Communicorp UK, of which O’Brien owns 98% of the shares.

In 1991, O’Brien formed a telecommunications consortium called Esat Telecom to compete with the state-owned Telecom Eireann. In partnership with Telenor, Norway’s state telecom operator, Esat formed Esat Digifone, which made a successful bid for Ireland’s second GSM mobile licence. Circumstances around the awarding of the licence to Esat Digifone became the subject of the Moriarty Tribunal.

In August 1997, O’Brien married Catherine Walsh, who helped Communicorp expand into the Czech Republic and who earlier was the head of marketing for Independent Radio Sales. The couple have four children.

In 1997, the Moriarty Tribunal was established to look into allegations against two Irish bureaucrats, Charles Haughey and Michael Lowry. After 14 years, the Tribunal’s final report found, among other things, that Lowry, Ireland’s then energy and communications minister, assisted O’Brien in his bid to secure a mobile phone contract for Esat Digifone. The tribunal found that this happened after Fine Gael received a $50,000 donation from O’Brien via a circuitous route, although the tribunal also acknowledged that the money was not intended as a payment. The tribunal concluded that Lowry gave “substantive information to Denis O’Brien, of significant value and assistance to him in securing the [mobile] licence” on at least two separate occasions. However, because the Tribunal was not a court of law, its findings were legally “sterile”.

On 7 November 1997, Esat Telecom Group plc held an initial public offering and was listed on the Irish Stock Exchange, London Stock Exchange, and NASDAQ. In 2000, Telenor made a bid for control of the company, but O’Brien sold it to BT, reportedly making €250 million from the sale.

Some time after his purchase of Quinta do Lago in 1998, but before Esat Telecom’s sale to BT in 2000, O’Brien sold his home in Dublin and established a primary residence in Portugal. Media reports have suggested that the move was spurred by a then-existing exemption to the capital gains tax in the Irish-Portuguese tax treaty, which reportedly would have saved O’Brien about €63 million in taxes.

In 1999, O’Brien co-founded aircraft leasing company Aergo Capital, of which he owned an 80% stake. From its inception until 2014, Aergo traded more than 150 aircraft with a gross value of over €791 million (approximately $1 billion). In October 2014, O’Brien and his partner, Fred Browne, sold the company to CarVal, a US investment firm; Browne remained with the new company as CEO.

In June 2000, O’Brien set up the Irish O’Brien Foundation, named after his mother, through which he coordinates many of his philanthropic efforts. In 2006, UCD awarded O’Brien an honorary doctorate.

Digicel was involved in an extensive court battle with the Jamaican Office of Utilities Regulation (OUR) throughout the 2000s. The issue originally arose after Phillip Paulwell, the then Jamaican minister of industry, commerce and technology, instructed the OUR to refrain from interfering with the pricing policies of Digicel, after the regulator had itself instructed Digicel to amend its interconnectivity fees. Although Paulwell was ruled to have had no power to issue the instruction to the OUR, Digicel unsuccessfully appealed the ruling first at the Jamaican Supreme Court, which overturned the ruling, though it was subsequently upheld by Court of Appeal after a counter-appeal by OUR, and then at Jamaica’s Privy Council.

In the late 2000s, O’Brien began purchasing shares of Independent News & Media (INM), ultimately spending an estimated €500 million to amass a 29.9% stake in the company. O’Brien clashed with the company’s board, especially former owner Tony O’Reilly, who stepped down from his position as CEO in 2009 and sold most of his INM shares in 2014. In April 2019, O’Brien and Dermont Desmond, INM’s second largest shareholder at the time, sold their shares to the Belgian media group Mediahuis; O’Brien reportedly received €43.5m as part of the deal.

In 2001, O’Brien founded Digicel, a telecom company that operates in the Caribbean, South America, and Asia Pacific. Using the cash from his sale of Esat Telecom, O’Brien used Digicel to build a wireless network in Jamaica. That same year, Digicel expanded into the South Pacific. As of 2019, Digicel operated in 31 countries.

O’Brien supported the 2003 Special Olympics World Summer Games, holding the title “Chairman of Council of Patrons.” He is also a director on the U.S. Board of Concern Worldwide.

While considering the flotation of Digicel on the New York Stock Exchange, a March 2006 filing to the Companies Registration Office (CRO) listed O’Brien’s residential address as Sliema, Malta. Although O’Brien has remained silent about his change of address, media have speculated that the mediterranean island’s lack of taxes on assets or income brought into the country was the primary incentive for the move.

In September 2005, O’Brien was named deputy governor of the Bank of Ireland. He resigned as Deputy Governor, and as a member of the Bank’s board or court, on 12 September 2006. The Bank of Ireland issued a statement describing his resignation as due to “his growing international business interests together with the demands of an extensive travel schedule, meant that he could no longer devote the time required to the ever increasing workload of the court.” O’Brien also resigned from the Norkom Group and the UCD Smurfit School of Business. His spokesman said these resignations were unconnected with the work of the Moriarty Tribunal.

On 13 February 2008, Football Association of Ireland chief executive John Delaney confirmed that O’Brien was funding the wages of Ireland national soccer team manager Giovanni Trapattoni. O’Brien’s soccer interests also extend to being a minority shareholder in Scottish club, Celtic.

In 2010, O’Brien was named a goodwill ambassador for Port-au-Prince by Mayor Jean Yves Jason, who cited O’Brien’s help with disaster recovery efforts after the earthquake. He is chairman of the Haiti Action Network, which coordinates the activities of approximately 80 support organisations in Haiti. Most recently, O’Brien reconstructed the Iron Market in Haiti’s capital Port-au-Prince, the first public building in the city to be rebuilt since the earthquake. He has also contributed to building 50 primary and secondary schools in 18 months following the earthquake.

O’Brien and the Clintons were prominent investors of time and money in Haiti following the 2010 earthquake. Bill Clinton also oversaw the building and then opened a luxury Marriott Hotel in Haiti; this hotel was owned by Digicel, which made a $45 million contribution.

Along with Digicel, O’Brien created the Digicel Foundation, which has worked with local organizations to develop community services, build schools and health centers, and support recovery efforts. After the 2010 Haiti earthquake, O’Brien pledged €3.5 million to assist recovery efforts. In 2012, President Michel Martelly of Haiti awarded O’Brien with the National Order of Honour and Merit for his investments, contributions and promotion of the country, and in 2015, O’Brien received honorary membership of the Order of Jamaica for his service to the country’s telecommunications industry.

In 2011, Bill Clinton flew to Ireland on O’Brien’s private jet to attend the Global Irish Economic Forum.

In 2011, O’Brien donated €2,500 to the campaign of Mary Davis for the Irish presidential election.

In 2012, O’Brien received the Clinton Global Citizen Award from former U.S. President Bill Clinton, due in part to his disaster relief efforts in Haiti. Also in 2012, President Michel Martelly of Haiti awarded O’Brien with the National Order of Honour and Merit for his investments, contributions and promotion of the country.

In 2012, O’Brien allegedly threatened to sue journalist and broadcaster Vincent Browne over statements in Browne’s articles that O’Brien claimed were defamatory. The Sunday Independent criticized the lawsuit as an attempt to “instill a fear of financial ruin”.

In 2012, O’Brien purchased Siteserv, a utilities support company, from IBRC for €45m; in 2015, the company was renamed Actavo. Actavo was bought and controlled through O’Brien’s firm Millington on the Isle of Man.

According to The Irish Times, Clinton’s 2013 speaking engagement at Dublin’s Conrad Hotel was “facilitated largely by his friend” Denis O’Brien. When opening his speech, Clinton personally thanked O’Brien “for the invitation.”

In February 2013, O’Brien sued the Irish Daily Mail for defamation over his numerous appearances in RTÉ news reports on the relief effort after the Haiti earthquake. The court awarded O’Brien €150,000. The case was the first time a journalist had attempted to use the honest opinion defence before a jury at the High Court since the Defamation Act 2009 became law.

In December 2013, O’Brien purchased €300 million in debt owed by Topaz Energy to the Irish Bank Resolution Corporation. In December 2014, Topaz’s parent company, Kendrick Investments, announced it would buy all of Esso’s Irish operations.

In January 2014, the Financial Times’ s Telecoms Correspondent wrote of O’Brien’s intention to expand Digicel into next-generation mobile and fixed line services, with O’Brien quoted as being excited by the prospect of a “world order [that] is changing.”

Although he never owned a majority stake in INM, O’Brien was at times accused of exerting significant influence at the company. In 2014, allegations arose that Stephen Rae, a group editor at INM, ordered amendments to a column by Sunday Independent editor Anne Harris that contained references to O’Brien. In 2015, Paul Meagher, a solicitor for O’Brien, reportedly called INM solicitor Simon McAleese in 2012 to block a story related to environment minister Phil Hogan.

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