Chinese puzzle behind a Dublin property sell-off

In March 2020 Colm Wu pulled off what appeared to be a transformational deal.
The Chinese businessman agreed to buy the Dublin One Collection, a number of buildings in the block next to Clerys department store, running south down Connell Street and around the corner to Lower Abbey Street. The vendor was D2 Private, the investment company headed by Deirdre Foley, who months previously had sold her interest in Clerys to Europa, a real estate fund.
Wu is said to have paid a little over €13 million for the portfolio. He already owned three buildings on nearby Middle Abbey Street, a building on Talbot Street and a hotel on Eden Quay overlooking the Liffey.
His empire stretched well beyond Dublin 1, however. It consisted of dozens of properties across the city, with several more dotted around the country. He was planning housing projects in Co Laois and Co Louth. From nowhere, Wu was becoming one of the country’s busiest investors in smaller-ticket, sub-€10 million property deals.
• 100 things to do in Dublin — shops, walks, sights and magical secret spots
Fast forward four years and Wu’s world has changed dramatically. Lenders recently sent in receivers to a number of prized assets. In recent months, his Lock Keeper pub in the Dublin suburb of Ashtown, by the Royal Canal, was sold to new owners while Mulligan & Haines on Dame Street in the city has shut. Revenue has appointed liquidators to wind up the companies behind them.
Tens of millions of euros worth of property is quietly up for sale as Wu tries to organise his tax affairs, pay down debt and restructure his empire.
It is understood that Wu has brought in a team of advisers to help restructure the sprawling business, which stretches to more than 50 companies.
Colm Wu — who sometimes goes by the names Guoqing Wu or Guo Qing Wu — does not give many interviews, yet in the middle of last year he sat down to shed a little light on how he got his start in business.
He arrived in Ireland about 20 years ago, he said, and began working as a kitchen porter in a restaurant, collecting dirty dishes, tidying tables and taking rubbish from the kitchen to the bins.
His family back in China were entrepreneurial, with interests in jewellery, mining and construction steel, he said. In his broken English, Wu joked that few of his friends knew about Ireland when he moved here.
“So when people would say, ‘Where are you?’, and I would say Ireland, they’d say, ‘Oh f***,” thinking he had moved to Northern Ireland, mistakenly assuming that the Troubles were still raging.
Over the years he worked his way up from kitchen porter to being a delivery driver and then a chef — often working 17 or 18-hour days, he said — before eventually becoming the owner of his own restaurant.
He built up savings, and joked that he always volunteered to clean the tables outside in the takeaway at night, “because a lot of people drinking after the disco [dropped] a lot of coins on the floor”.
The financial crash, far from damaging his business, enhanced it, he said, as punters traded down. “At the time [of the Celtic tiger] people were eating in Patrick Guilbaud, but our restaurant was much lower cost.”
His first investment was a takeaway pizza shop in Blessington, Co Wicklow, which has since been sold on. It was followed not long after by an investment in a building on Abbey Street. He also owned a launderette in Walkinstown.
Wu’s investment business would take a quantum leap from 2011 onwards as property prices collapsed and struggling banks moved to appoint receivers to properties. In 2012 the state launched the immigrant investor programme to attract capital into the economy.
Wu found himself in the enviable position of having access to ready cash at at time when banks were looking to offload properties at rock-bottom prices. It allowed him to buy prize assets in Dublin city such as Sweeney’s, a music venue on Dame Street. When Wu acquired the property close to Trinity College in 2017, it was the only city centre pub to be sold that year.
It was treated to an extensive revamp and rechristened Mulligan & Haines, a nod to its literary past: No 32 Dame Street featured as the Dublin Bread Company in James Joyce’s Ulysses where Buck Mulligan and his companion Haines stopped off for a feed.
Wu acquired Georgian buildings on Harcourt Street and Leeson Street, including the former home of the famous, or infamous, Buck Whaley’s nightclub.
He bought the Watermarque hotel in Cahirciveen, Co Kerry; the Grand hotel in Tramore; and the Danby hotel near Rosslare in Wexford. He also took over Dobbins bistro, a favourite haunt for businessmen, showbiz and media types off Baggot Street, which closed in the recession.
Wu raised funds from friends, family and investors in Dublin, Hong Kong and mainland China. Where possible, he leveraged investor funds with debt. With the pillar banks closed for business he often accessed the most expensive debt, short-term bridging finance, which is normally used to cover the gaps between traditional bank finance and as a result comes at high interest rates.
Alternative lenders fuelling his spending spree included Earlsfort Capital Partners, Lotus, Capitalflow, Sancus Lending and First Citizen Finance.
For example, Bo Vision Property Holdings, a Wu company, borrowed just over €8 million from seven Chinese investors to acquire the Watermarque hotel in Cahirciveen and the Grand hotel in Tramore. The plan was to acquire the hotels, renovate them and sell them on at a profit. Investors would be paid up to 5 per cent on their loans to the business, and were given security over the properties.
The Covid-19 pandemic, which arrived just as Wu signed for the Dublin One Collection, would have a cataclysmic effect on his burgeoning empire. Trading businesses closed, choking off cashflow. Construction halted, so planned redevelopment of properties, some of which had fallen into disrepair, was held in abeyance.
Investors and lenders soon started to get twitchy. In August 2021 Earlsfort Capital Partners appointed Shane McCarthy of KPMG as receiver over assets within a portfolio of Wu companies as a result of breaches of loan covenants.
Later that year Diankai Wang, an investor in Bo Vision, the company redeveloping the properties in Cahirciveen and Tramore, brought the first of two unsuccessful court actions against Wu, seeking injunctions.
In the summer of 2022 McCarthy, the receiver, sold a number of properties at Upper and Middle Abbey Street for more than €9 million and Earlsfort’s debt was paid down. Wu managed to raise fresh funding from the Hong Kong-based Collen Investment Group and Li Li, a Dublin-based Chinese investor, to retain certain assets within the portfolio, including No 10 Harcourt Street, which at the time had an estimated value of about €2.6 million.
Meanwhile, following the sale of the Watermarque, now the Skellig Star, the company fully satisfied the charge held by the investors on the two hotels.
Wu also refinanced the Dublin One Collection in late 2022, again through Collen Investment and its representative Jack Wu (no relation).
Just as it seemed the storm had passed, more challenges emerged. Despite the ending of Covid restrictions, two of Wu’s pubs — Mulligan & Haines and the Lock Keeper — struggled to battle rising cost inflation.
Between them, the two pubs owed €1.2 million to Revenue, which sought to have them wound up. In November last year Wu sought to have examiners appointed to Mulligan & Haines Hospitality, which somewhat confusingly operated the Lock Keeper and Castor Ventures, which ran Mulligan & Haines.
An independent expert report on the companies said the company had no lease for either premises, which were both owned by other Wu companies. Due to its tax difficulties, neither premises had a liquor licence.
The independent expert, Gerard Hughes of Roberts Nathan, also noted that there were substantial intercompany balances with other Wu companies. One of those companies, Abbey Lane Hotel Trading, had borrowed a sum of more than €346,000 from Mulligan & Haines Hospitality to refurbish a property to accommodate Ukrainian refugees.
“It has come to my attention that cashflows generated from the property have been systematically employed to support the financial health of the broader group entities,” Hughes wrote. “It is imperative that the company address these issues promptly and implements robust internal controls to ensure compliance with legal obligations and the preservation of its long-term viability.”
He added that it was “apparent that the director … may not have a complete grasp of their directorial duties and obligations”, a situation that goes “beyond overseeing the company’s financial performance; they include strategic planning, risk management, adherence to legal standards and safeguarding the interests of shareholders”.
Ultimately, the Lock Keeper was rescued under a new owner, the well-known hospitality operator Alan Murtagh. Mulligan & Haines was put into liquidation.
Since the start of the year, Revenue have petitioned the High Court to get liquidators appointed to two companies previously in receivership. In May First Citizen Finance appointed receivers over three properties owned by yet another Colm Wu company, Baron Clonbrock Capital.
The outstanding debts with Revenue have had deep implications for the business. Sources say the taxman has withdrawn clearance certificates from a number of companies within the broader group.
As a result the companies have not been receiving income from state contracts to house Ukrainian refugees in three of his hotels — the Danby hotel in Wexford, the former Sweeney’s hotel above Mulligan & Haines and the Abbey hotel.
The source says that Wu’s hotels are owed about €4 million on those contracts with the state’s international protection accommodation services (up from €1.22 million at the time of the examination petition last November).
Wu has brought in a team of accountants to burrow into the books of the 50 or so companies and to come to a final figure in relation to his tax liabilities.
For other parts of the empire, it is business as usual.
He has offloaded several properties, including the former Dobbins restaurant, which was sold for close to €850,000 and is now, according to The Currency news website, to be opened by the businessman Barry O’Halloran.
A property at 7 Dame Street, which was listed for €2.3 million and is now occupied by a dental business, has been sold; soo too a property on Gardiner Street that fetched about €2.3 million.
More are up for sale, including the Clifton hotel, which is on the market for €8.5 million. A building at 37 Harcourt Street is being offered for €3.8 million. Wu is selling 11-11a Ormond Court with a guide price of €1.3 million. And a portfolio of properties at the Village Centre and River Centre in Ashtown, Dublin 15, has a guide price of €8.5 million.
That still leaves a lot of property on his books, however. The Sunday Times tried to get specifics on the size of his debt, or the number of assets left in his portfolio, but his solicitor Brendan Liddy — who is also a tenant in one of Wu’s buildings, which is in receivership — declined to give any details. Liddy described such information as being only “of interest to readers of Punch [Phoenix] magazine, or whatever it’s called”.
The immigrant investor programme closed last year, yet Wu had long since stopped using it as a source of capital. Publicly available company documents, however, show that in the last two years Wu has managed to recruit a new suite of backers/lenders.
Some of them are private individuals — such as Yingchun Deng of Foxrock, Dublin 18; Yan Tang of Leopardstown; Li Li of Goatstown; and Anthony and Margaret Robinson of Donnybrook — while he also has debts with Santiago Capital and Sancus Lending.
Wu is still pursuing opportunities, applying with a number of partners to turn the derelict Showboat pub in Waterford into apartments. The businessman is not planning to go back to the kitchen sink anytime soon.