Ex-solicitor believed he was ‘going to be killed’ as practice faced closure

Ireland’s recent past is a foreign country, the jury was told on the opening day of Thomas Byrne’s trial four weeks ago. Yesterday they took a guided tour of its exotic landscape – a place where suburban solicitors owned Bentleys and lunched at the Four Seasons Hotel, where multimillion loans were “sorted out” in the executive boxes at Croke Park.

And a place where Mr Byrne built a roaringly successful solicitor’s practice only to see it all unravel over the space of a few days in 2007.

The former solicitor broke down in the witness box as he described the day he heard a colleague was reporting him to the Law Society for forging her signature.

Mutual acquaintance
Mr Byrne said his client and business associate, the property developer John Kelly, told him to go to a Centra shop in Rathmines in Dublin, where a mutual acquaintance was the manager. Arriving at the shop, Mr Byrne was brought into a walk-in freezer at the back of the premises. "I thought I was going to be killed. I really did," he told the court. Instead, the woman handed him €10,000 in cash, gave him a hug and wished him good luck.

Mr Byrne said that on the same day, Mr Kelly contacted him and told to leave the country “or there would be serious consequences”.

Within a few hours he was on a ferry to Holyhead.

Mr Byrne (47), of Walkinstown Road, Crumlin, Dublin, is accused of theft and fraud offences totalling €51.8 million. The charges allege he transferred clients’ homes into his name and then used them as collateral for property loans. He has pleaded not guilty at Dublin Circuit Criminal Court to 50 counts of theft, forgery, using forged documents and deception between 2004 and 2007.

Wearing a dark suit and multi-coloured tie, Mr Byrne told the court he never meant to defraud anyone. He said Mr Kelly, who had become his biggest client, “inveigled” his way into the office and became an aggressive presence in his daily life.

Mr Byrne said he had to acquire properties and borrow large amounts of money because he was under pressure to make payments of up to €450,000 a week into an account belonging to Mr Kelly, who couldn’t get money from the banks himself so “groomed” Mr Byrne to borrow on his behalf.

'Quite aggressive'
"I started to become afraid of him," Mr Byrne said. "He indicated his brother was involved with people up the North, as he put it. He was quite aggressive."

Mr Byrne described Mr Kelly’s girlfriend, Mary O’Connor, making veiled threats against his daughter when he refused to pay over €250,000 so Mr Kelly could travel to Spain.

By the time his practice was shut down in 2007, Mr Byrne said, he was a chronic alcoholic and rarely came into the office. “I knew the whole thing was going to fall apart, and it did.”