‘We believe that we can double the size of our business again’.What is Carolan Lennon’s legacy at Eir?.Private equity firm TPG hits $10bn valuation on first day of trading.A total of AUS$850 million (€535 million) was wiped off EML’s market value that day.
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Shares in Brisbane-based EML plunged almost 46 per cent on the day it emerged the Irish financial regulator had raised anti-money laundering and counterterrorism concerns over PFS. In addition to not receiving any of the earn-out due so far, the Morans, who owned 81 per cent of PFS prior to the sale, further lost out as the value of the 6.9 per cent stake they have in EML, shrank on news of the investigation.
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Legal action is likely to follow after the inquiry concludes as the couple seek to claw back monies they believed are still owed to them. It was just perfect timing for them because they would have had to pay a significant part of the earn out in year one but then the Central Bank came in and it gave EML an option to accrue a lot of expenses that meant they didn’t have to pay us,” Moran says. The businessman also believes that, while EML had no other option but to tell shareholders about the investigation, they relied on that information to avoid paying a €55 million earn-out the Morans are due from the sale of PFS. The entrepreneur is annoyed with the way the news first emerged and is keen for the regulator to revise the means by which it announces investigations, particularly ones involving publicly listed businesses. I knew that would be the outcome as we’d carefully managed the business for so many years.” “PFS issued more than 10 million accounts and, despite there being 40-odd people sent in to investigate the company on behalf of the regulator, nothing on anti-money laundering or counterterrorism has been uncovered. We ran a perfectly respectable business and I knew from day one it would be cleared of any wrongdoing but we’ve had to put up with having a cloud over our heads all this time,” Moran adds. “It isn’t nice to see your name linked in news articles to activities undertaken by drug cartels and terrorists but that is what happened to us, with some reporting noting the use of prepaid cards for these things. “Obviously, the whole investigation has been upsetting and damaging, both from a reputational point of view, and financially,” he says. It obviously came as a huge shock,” says Moran.Īs the inquiry nears its end with no findings yet made against PFS or its parent, Moran is finally ready to talk about its impact on him, his wife and his other business interests.
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“I only found out about it all when I saw it in the newspaper. Neither the financial regulator nor EML Payments, the Australian fintech that had acquired PFS, had told him the news in advance. Like most people, he first heard of what was to become a long, in-depth investigation, by reading about it in the media. He woke up that morning to the news that the Central Bank was considering taking regulatory action against Prepaid Financial Services (PFS), a company founded by him and his wife Valerie in 2008, and which he had sold just over a year earlier. It might be an exaggeration to describe May 18th this year as the worst day of Noel Moran’s life, but it certainly wasn’t one of the better ones.