Business Opinion/John McManus: Philip Lynch, the outgoing and much respected managing director of IAWS made an interesting point at the company's full-year results presentation last week.

In what amounted to his valedictory address after some 20 years at the top of Irish business, Mr Lynch said that his mantra had always been "keep the mystery", which he translated as not broadcasting his strategy to competitors.

Mr Lynch has played this game well over the last 20 years, but still ends up looking like a blabbermouth compared to Martin Naughton, whose Glen Dimplex has made an art form out of being mysterious. Last week was a good example. On Tuesday the company issued a press release saying that it had bought a Norwegian electrical heating company from Siemens. By Glen Dimplex's standards it was quite informative. It disclosed the turnover of the acquisition - but not the price paid - and some background to the deal.

It also said the following: "Glen Dimplex, a privately owned Irish group, has an annual turnover of €1.5 billion and employs 8,500 people worldwide, of whom 2,500 are employed in Ireland. " And that is pretty much the sum of what non-insiders know about Glen Dimplex, one of the most successful Irish business stories of the last 20 years. The company stoutly refuses to divulge any more information and appears to have gone to considerable lengths to make sure little is easily available.

The normal place to try and find out a bit more information about a company is the Companies Office in Dublin. But this is something of a dead end in Glen Dimplex's case as it is not a limited company, and, as a result, does not have to file the fairly minimal financial information the State demands in return for conferring limited liability on directors.

Even the ownership of the company is not obvious from the Companies Office filings. The shares are held by two companies: Kilkee Investments Limited, which has 697999 ordinary shares, and Kilkee Company, which owns one share. Despite having Irish names and sharing the same Irish address as Glen Dimplex, they are in fact Isle of Man-based. It may be well known that Glen Dimplex is 74 per cent owned by its founder Martin Naughton, with the remainder held by Lochlann Quinn, but you would be a long time in the Companies Office before you found a piece of paper that said so.

The most informative thing about the Glen Dimplex filings is the list of other Irish and international directorship held by Mr Naughton and Mr Quinn, which in both cases run to around 50.

Pulling the files on the Irish companies is not very interesting. There are a couple of Irish manufacturing companies, a couple of dormant companies and the group's IFSC-based captive insurance operation. There is nothing that will give your anything approaching an insight into the group.

The filing for Glen Electric Ltd, the Northern Irish-based holding company for 30 or so other companies, is more fruitful. It seems pretty fair to assume that Glen Electric is the heart of the group, as the list of subsidiaries attached to the 2002 consolidated financial statements of Glen Electric is a pretty good match with the list of directorships given for Mr Naughton in the Glen Dimplex filing.

They also show strong growth in turnover from £454 million sterling (€657 million) to £578 million and operating profit rising from £34 million to £38 million. Long-term bank debt was £34 million. There was a rather tidy dividend of £10.5 million paid, presumably, to Glen Dimplex. Net current assets of the company were £87 million and shareholders' funds and loans stood at £110 million. Its interesting stuff - if you like that sort of thing.

Glen Electric's accounts, however, paint only part of the picture. Its turnover in the year to March 2002 of £578 million sterling is roughly €840 million, which is still some way short of the €1.5 billion the company currently turns over. Similarly. Glen Electric employs around 5,500 workers, compared to the group total of 8,500.

So what about the companies that account for the rest of Glen Dimplex's turnover. Where are they and what do they do? They remain the third secret of Glen Dimplex. But given the pretty pedestrian nature of the Glen Electric side of things, it's hard to understand why Mr Naughton and Mr Quinn have gone to such lengths to keep us in the dark.

Maybe its Philip Lynch's thing about "keeping the mystery", but I doubt it. Maybe they think it is no one else's business how they make their money and what they do with it. Both men, after all, are resident here and pay their taxes here.

This is fair enough, but it is still a bit cheeky given their enthusiasm to play leadership roles in Irish society. Mr Naughton, after all, is a member of the Council of State and chairman of Intertrade Ireland. Lochlann Quinn is chairman of AIB.

jmcmanus@irish-times.ie