Frank Shortt feels the pain of Ryanair share nosedive
Big name punters take a hit on airline's price drop
THE SHARES WHICH FELL TO EARTH: Clockwise from main pic, Frank Shortt in jubilant mood outside the Court of Criminal Appeal with his daughter Azariah. Tom Bailey, Michael O'Leary, Ray MacSharry, Kyran McLaughlin, Roy Foster, Tim Pat Coogan. Centre, Ethel Power
FRANK Shortt, the man who was awarded €4.7m damages by the State for wrongful imprisonment, has lost a packet on the stock market.
Mr Shortt is among a host of top Irish businessmen and other celebrities who invested heavily in Ryanair and are now nursing painful losses.
After he received the largest punitive damages sum in the history of the State in compensation for trumped-up drug charges, Donegal man Shortt bought 60,000 shares in Ryanair in May last year. Since then the shares have nearly halved, leaving him with a loss in the region of €160,000.
Mr Shortt is in good company. Two of Ireland's best known historians, Tim Pat Coogan and Professor Roy Foster have seen their confidence in Ryanair shares shattered as the value of their holdings plunged. Professor Foster, author of the widely applauded biography of WB Yeats and other works of historical merit, holds 2,000 shares jointly with his wife.
Coogan, a former Irish Press editor and biographer of Michael Collins , took a bigger risk, picking up 7,000 shares -- leaving him down nearly €20,000 on paper from the share's peak levels.
A surprise loser is Michael Somers, the head of the National Treasury Management Agency, the guardian of the nation's pensioners' funds.
Mr Somers' personal holding of 10,000 shares in Ryanair is now worth just €29,000 having been worth a substantially more earlier this year.
Another businessman to have taken a bath is former CRH chief Harry Sheridan. He has a stake of 100,000 shares which have lost over €250,000 in value over a 12-month period.
Ryanair is one of the worst-performing stocks on the Irish stock market this year. The Iseq has in turn been one of the poorest performers in the world in 2008.
High-powered economists have also been tempted by the Ryanair story. Alan Gray, the boss at Indecon Consultants, holds 13,250 shares -- now worth €38,000, but down nearly €25,000 from last year's peaks. Jerome Casey, another economist who correctly predicted a property market collapse for 2007 and 2008, has not been so prescient with his share investments. Mr Casey holds 3,400 Ryanair shares worth €9,000.
Not many politicians are fans of Michael O'Leary's airline, but FF Minister of State Sean Power is a holder, as was Green Party deputy leader Mary White , who inherited a basket and dumped them immediately because of carbon emissions.
Fine Gael TDs Jim O'Keeffe and Frank Feighan are hanging onto their shares, while in the Seanad only two Fianna Fail members. Larry Butler and Mark Daly, star of RTE's Home Salvage programme, are supporters of the low-cost airline. Former MEP and one -time president of the Irish Farmers' Association Alan Gillis has 2,000 shares.
Ryanair boss Michael O'Leary himself has taken a hammering. The 65 million shares he holds in the company he runs are now worth a mere €185m -- a drop of nearly €200m since last year, but the chief executive has already sold a healthy number.
Others on the board to have suffered include director James Osborne whose 1.4 million shares are down €3.8m from their peak value.
Fellow director and partner in Davy stockbrokers Kyran McLaughlin restricted his holding to 50,000 shares, limiting his paper loss to around €140,000.
Former Ryanair chairman Ray MacSharry's 14,560 shares are now worth €42,000 -- but would have fetched €83,000 at their top level. Ex-Ryanair employee and now head of Tipp FM Ethel Power is still a believer, holding onto her 4,000 shares.
Sportsmen with substantial holdings include former Irish rugby captain Tom Kiernan, who holds 22, 000 shares (and so he has lost over €50,000), while Donald Pratt, who played cricket for Ireland before going on to found the highly successful Avoca Handweavers, has a holding of 5,000.
Few media names appear on the share register, but former Irish Times business editor Andrew Whittaker -- currently editor of Competition Magazine -- has a holding of 8,000 shares.
High-profile solicitors Stephen McKenzie of Shrewsbury Road and Declan Moylan, managing partner of Mason Hayes and Curran, are small shareholders.
Other high-profile investors with holdings include Bovale Developers boss Tom Bailey, Press Council chairman and former TCD provost Tom Mitchell and Michael Fingleton of the Irish Nationwide Building Society. Among the corporate holders listed are Thomas Crosbie Holdings (85,000 shares), the Masonic Trust (50,000 shares), FX Buckley butchers, and FBD insurers, which has bought nearly 800,000 shares.
- JOHN O'REILLY
