JP McManus: From horse racing to Manchester United – profiling the billionaire who bet big on Limerick hurling
Liam Collins profiles the businessman and philanthropist who started from humble farming roots and made a fortune in the high-octane world of financial trading, but whose rise to the top has not been without moments of controversy
Limerick manager John Kiely (right) and businessman JP McManus celebrate after the GAA Hurling All-Ireland Senior Championship Final victory last Sunday. Photo by Stephen McCarthy/Sportsfile
JP McManus’s neo-Palladian mansion outside Kilmallock, Co Limerick, includes a 200-seater cinema
Jockey AP McCoy chats with JP McManus at Cheltenham Races. Photo by Frank McGrath
JP McManus and his daughter Sue Ann Foley. Photo by Alan Place
Limerick manager John Kiely (right) and businessman JP McManus celebrate after the GAA Hurling All-Ireland Senior Championship Final victory last Sunday. Photo by Stephen McCarthy/Sportsfile
Unlike every other county’s, Limerick’s hurling jersey does not bear a sponsor’s logo. JP McManus, the billionaire currency trader and gambler who has poured millions into the team over the past decade, doesn’t need or want the exposure.
Like his vast horse-racing empire, it is more of a vanity project than business venture. The real money is made from a relatively small and anonymous dealing room among the ‘financial gnomes’ of Geneva, Switzerland, where he is domiciled for tax purposes.
Instead of promoting himself or his ventures on the jerseys worn in back-to-back All-Ireland hurling victories, the green shirt of Limerick has, in small yellow lettering, the names of every club in the county stitched into the fabric.
Jockey AP McCoy chats with JP McManus at Cheltenham Races. Photo by Frank McGrath
McManus, whose racing colours are the green and yellow hoops of the Co Limerick South Liberties GAA club, was in Croke Park with the legendary jockey AP McCoy when he was thanked from the podium last Sunday by captain Declan Hannon for his “phenomenal” support.
Leaving the stadium, one disgruntled Cork supporter complained that when a Limerick player gets injured, he is taken by helicopter to the Santry Sports Clinic for the best medical treatment money can buy, courtesy of JP’s largesse, and how could any team compete against that kind of backing.
Whether the after-match celebrations took place in JP and Noreen McManus’s palatial Ailesbury Road home in Dublin or Martinstown House, the neo-Palladian mansion they built outside Kilmallock, Co Limerick, it is likely that the teetotal McManus calmly sipped a glass of cranberry juice as the champagne corks popped around him.
It is also likely that the joy of the occasion was tinged with sadness, following the tragic death of his daughter-in-law and mother of three of his young grandchildren, Emma McManus (40) at the family residence in Barbados on December 30.
In the public imagination, JP McManus is associated with ‘ordinary’ sports, such as national hunt racing and hurling, and with extraordinary philanthropy.
JP McManus and his daughter Sue Ann Foley. Photo by Alan Place
The JP McManus Charitable Foundation has been dispensing millions to good causes in Limerick for years and had funds of more than €164m at the end of 2019. McManus’s wife Noreen and daughter Sue Ann Foley are directors.
At fundraising dinners, wealthy supporters have offered €1m to play a round of golf with his friend Tiger Woods and he moves easily among a coterie of wealthy businessmen between his homes in Ireland, Switzerland and Barbados.
But it is the world of currency speculation and high-octane financial trading that has propelled him from bookie and gambler to billionaire. Only occasionally do mere mortals get a glimpse into JP’s gilded world, a place he could hardly have imagined when he was driving a digger and milking cows for his father, John James McManus, as a young lad in Limerick.
In 2017, it was revealed that during a 72-hour backgammon match in California some years earlier, McManus won a staggering $17.4m from the Israeli-born US tech billionaire Alec Gores. Gores then deducted $5.2m, which he handed over to the US Inland Revenue Service (IRS). McManus sued for the money.
He claimed that year, 2012, he paid a €200,000 “domicile levy” to the Irish tax authorities. This, he said, qualified him to avail of a 1997 double taxation treaty between the Irish and US governments. It was claimed by McManus’ lawyer during the case that a senior official in the Irish Revenue supplied the IRS with information that the businessman paid no tax in Ireland between 1995 and 2010.
The IRS argued that because he was domiciled in Switzerland, he was not entitled to use the taxation treaty, and the judge agreed with them.
“I love gambling,” McManus told journalist and former jockey Brough Scott in an interview for the Racing Post in 2010. “Gambling is a gene. It’s not your fault if you gamble. It’s like an addiction, but I had a friend who had a problem and I said I wanted to teach him not to be an addicted gambler but an addicted winner. We don’t bet to gamble; we bet to win. Winning is the addiction, not gambling.”
Back in 1982 after his horse Mister Donovan won the Sun Alliance Hurdle at Cheltenham, his first winner at the Cotswold racecourse, I was standing beside him when Woodrow Wyatt, the cigar-smoking chairman of the UK Tote, introduced him to the Queen Mother. “I’m so glad you have won JP — nobody has put more money on the racecourses of England then you have,” Wyatt said.
At that moment, I realised that the stories I had heard about him weren’t just a figment of journalists’ imaginations. But it was when McManus turned the skills that he learned on the racecourse to high finance that he became unimaginably wealthy.
John Patrick McManus was born in the Roxboro area of Limerick on March 10, 1951. After the local national school, he went to CBS Sexton Street, leaving at 16 to work on his father’s farm at Martinstown six days a week, with Saturday afternoons off to play the horses.
“My father, John, read a lot about horses,” he told the Sunday Independent in 1985. “The smallest bet he had was £1, and that was also the biggest bet he had.”
While still a teenager, JP started gambling in Alf Hogan’s bookie shop in Lower William Street and played cards in the pub at night.
He says he started taking bets himself when the betting tax of 5p in the pound increased significantly in the budget. “Overnight I stopped betting in the shops. I began taking some bets unofficially and then got a board [pitch] at the dogs” in Markets Field, he told Brough Scott. Although his father “wasn’t keen”, he took out a bookmaker’s licence at 21, earning the nickname ‘The Kid’ from the other bookies. The journalist Raymond Smith later added the ‘Sundance’ tag.
Associates say that while he had a good head for figures, what made him outstanding was his methodical research. McManus himself said he rarely talked to owners or trainers and regarded ‘tips’ as a waste of time. “The cheapest thing to buy and the best value is the form book,” he said.
By the mid-1980s, he was known on the racecourses of England as a formidable gambler with a reputation for taking the bookies to the cleaners.
“The English bookies welcomed me with open arms, champagne and booze, even though I don’t drink,” he recalled with satisfaction in 1985. “Now I don’t even get an entrance ticket.”
Asked about his biggest betting coup, he replied, “the best strokes are the ones no one has ever heard of”.
As well as gambling on almost anything, he always carried a backgammon board with him and was a skilled player.
In the late 1980s, McManus became part of the ‘Sandy Lane set’ staying with his family in the exclusive Barbados hotel and resort, consorting with Coolmore Stud owner John Magnier and his supporters Michael Tabor and Derrick Smith, financier Dermot Desmond and the legendary currency trader Joe Lewis.
The 1992 financial crisis propelled the group from millionaires to billionaires. On Black Wednesday — September 16, 1992 — currency speculators led by Lewis and George Soros recognised that the British pound was overvalued. They bet billions that the Bank of England would devalue and they were right, forcing it out of the Exchange Rate Mechanism (ERM).
In the weeks that followed, currency speculators are believed to have made £150bn betting against the remaining ERM currencies, including the punt. After sustained pressure, Finance Minister Bertie Ahern was forced to devalue the punt in January 1993 and currency dealers pocketed the profits, before moving on to the Mexican peso for further gains.
It was the beginning of an investment splurge that would see the ‘Irish boys’ buy the Sandy Lane resort in the late 1990s, causing consternation with plans to demolish the colonial-style establishment. They eventually rebuilt the hotel to their liking,reopening it with a spectacular party on St Patrick’s Day 2001.
Back home, McManus’s leisure interests include Adare Manor, which will host the Ryder Cup in 2027.
Manchester United Stake
Though his brother Gerry, JP got to know the Manchester United manager Alex Ferguson, who became a regular visitor to Limerick and part of the group’s inner circle. By coincidence or otherwise, Magnier, McManus and — to a lesser extent — Desmond, bought a 6.8pc stake in the football club through a firm called Cubic Expression in 2001.
It emerged that this company was associated with Liberties Strategic Services, a Bermuda-registered company based at 40 Rue du Rhone, Geneva. Given the echo of (South) Liberties, McManus’s GAA team, this was assumed to be his private investment firm, although he is not a director of the company.
It was to turn out to be a lucrative investment. But it also drew the unwelcome spotlight of the British media on the Irishmen and their business dealings. This became especially intense after Magnier and Ferguson fell out over the ownership of ‘wonder horse’ Rock of Gibraltar.
By February 2004, as the row between the two men escalated, and Cubic Expression now owned 28.39pc of Manchester United. Although McManus was not directly involved in the row, he was perceived by Manchester United supporters as a threat to Ferguson and they began threatening to disrupt Cheltenham Races, where JP had enjoyed huge success, including three-consecutive victories in the Champion Hurdle with his horse Istabraq.
On May 11, 2005, shortly after the Magnier-Ferguson row had been settled out of court, he and JP McManus sold their Manchester United stake to the Florida sports tycoon Malcolm Glazer for an estimated £230m, making a huge profit in the process.
Over the years, the trio of McManus, Magnier and Desmond have had diverse investments together, such as the English pub group Mitchells & Butlers, the Ladbrokes bookie chain and the nursing home group Barchester, as well as any number of private investments that little or nothing is known about.
JP McManus’s neo-Palladian mansion outside Kilmallock, Co Limerick, includes a 200-seater cinema
Lavish reception
Around 2007, JP and his wife Noreen renovated Martinstown House, which they had bought from the McCalmont family in 1982, into a 38,000 sq ft mansion, believed to be the largest private house in Ireland.
The same year, a lavish reception for 1,000 guests was held in the grounds when their only daughter, Sue Ann, married. According to reports at the time, JP paid Limerick County Council an unspecified sum to have all the roads leading to the church and house resurfaced, and refurbished the local church for the occasion.
Apart from its sheer scale, with underground car parking, gym, 200-seater cinema, games rooms and swimming pool, Martinstown House has a full-scale Irish bar, even though JP never took a drink.
“I was lucky in my life,” JP told Brough Scott as the two racing men looked at a picture of JP’s father, dressed in his Sunday best, with his horse Roxboro Jack at the Cappamore Show.
Even his prostate cancer operation in 2009, he claimed, had a silver lining. “You know a lot of good came out of the cancer, you see things in a different light,” he said. “I got more out of it than I lost and there was never a day when I didn’t think I’d make it.”
There probably wasn’t a day he ever doubted that the Limerick hurling team would win the All-Ireland hurling double either. What JP wants, he usually gets.
