According to Forbes magazine, financier Dermot Desmond tested 29 different salt and pepper grinders before choosing the best one for his new Pink Sands Club Resort on the island of Canouan in the Grenadine islands. Desmond is building the resort at a cost of hundreds of millions, proving that while other Irish businessmen such as Seán Quinn and Tony O'Reilly have lost millions, he remains extremely successful.
It is intriguing to mull over just how Desmond has occupied himself during the bust other than constructing a tropical paradise. Clearly he was intelligent enough to avoid the danger of overexposure to Irish banking shares, Irish property or Irish media stocks, unlike Quinn or O’Reilly.
Desmond saw through the bank guarantee early on, and wisely – but regrettably unheeded – advised the government to prepare a plan B as soon as possible.
Desmond is known to have instead invested in international technology stocks such as Optimal Payments where he was reported to have pocked a fortune in February 2014 after selling his stake. He also bought into Independent News & Media well below its peak.
But could Desmond have made another fortune from his little known investment company QED Investments which was founded in 2007, just before the world’s banks went into freefall?
Very little is known about this company other than it says on its website, “to date QED has helped its institutional partners restructure over $45 billion of risk assets.” Who these partners are is not known but €32,900,000,000 is a big chunk of change to restructure and presumably QED earned money from doing so.
As an unlimited company QED, whose directors are Desmond, Michael Walsh, the former chairman of Irish Nationwide who was also a director of Desmond’s International Investment and Underwriting vehicle, and two others does not have to disclose its financial accounts.
However well QED did or didn’t do, Desmond has clearly salted away enough money to survive the greatest financial crash since 1929 from his various different investments.
