Sean O’Driscoll, the former chief executive of Glen Dimplex, has been active again in the Irish stock market in the last month, new filings show.
Early in July, he boosted his stake in Datalex from 5.31 per cent to 6.11 per cent, a stake that is worth €3.5 million at Datalex’s current share price.
And more recently, he increased his holding in Malin Corporation, the life sciences company, pushing his stake from 10.19 per cent to 11.32 per cent. At Malin’s current share price of around €5.40, that values his stake at around €12.4 million.
Not every investment by O’Driscoll has worked out as well, however. In 2021, he took a stake in Providence Resources, the ill-fated oil exploration company, which later changed its name to Barryroe Resources and was ultimately taken private by beef baron Larry Goodman.
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Quite what any of this has done for O’Driscoll’s portfolio is a little hard to determine. He guards his financial information assertively. For example, when the news of his stake in Providence was first disclosed to the market, the filing referred only to “S O’Driscoll and R O’Riordan” — that is, Sean O’Driscoll and his wife, Rose O’Riordan.
However, when O’Driscoll was contacted by the Business Post to confirm this fact, he declined to do so, curtly rebuffing any questions by saying: “You’ve got the wrong man.”
Meanwhile, his investment vehicle, Roaring Waters Limited, gives little more information on what else might be in his portfolio. The most recent accounts, which are for the period to the end of December 2022, show that O’Driscoll and O’Riordan had investments worth €14 million and cash worth €3.6 million.
Of the investments, €13.2 million was listed investments, while the rest – €731,578 – was unlisted investments.
What changes have been wrought by O’Driscoll’s latest stock market moves, not to mention the end of Barryroe’s life as a listed company, will only be evident in Roaring Waters’s next set of published accounts.
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