 Now, Michael Lin, the rogue solicitor and perhaps poster boy for the Celtic Tiger, and you could probably call him our most notorious white-collar crook, was eventually caught, and I say eventually it took a long time, but eventually caught and jailed and sentenced actually in January of this year. Well, now there's a book about the story about catching up with him and about how he was eventually brought to trial, and it is written by Michael O'Farl, and Michael is an investigative journalist. He has reported widely on matters of public interest over the years, started with the Irish examiner, and then joined the Irish Mail on Sundays, currently their investigations editor, was actually named campaigning journalist of the year at the Irish Journalism Awards last year. And the book is called Fugitive, the Michael Lin story, and Michael O'Farl, that is, now joins us on the line. Michael, good afternoon. Hi John, thanks for having me on. Let's talk about this. Where do you start with this? Well, let's start with you going after him. Was it 2007 you were sent by the paper to try to find him? That's right, yeah. Well, Michael Lin went on the run in December 2007, and a month later, in January 2008, I was sitting in the chair, I'm sitting in now in my home office, and my paper rang and said, look, we're going to go and find him. It doesn't matter what it's going to cost, we're going to do it. And I'll be frank with you, I didn't want that job. I was new enough in the paper at the time, and I didn't think anyone stood a chance of finding Michael Lin. He'd had a month head start. It could be anywhere in the world, and I just didn't think it was a feasible job. But I had to do what the boss has said, so off I went and I began to learn everything I could find about Mr. Lin. And I quickly found myself running around the world, running around Europe, following his various trails and his money trails. And you know, we did find him after a year and finally got in front of him and did an interview with him, the first ever interview, the only ever interview with him. That would have been in early 2009. But the journey to find him taught me probably as much, if not more, about Mr. Lin than the interview did, you know? Yeah, because I suppose you were investigating along the way, but it can't have been an easy task to track him down because we're chatting with different countries here. Yeah, we travel frequently. Mr. Lin had bases in Portugal, in Bulgaria, in Slovakia, in, you know, he was all over Europe. And we frequently ran around following the various leads we found. And you know, it was interesting to do that because one of the problems I had was getting in front of him, we're getting there on time, because we'd get a tip off that maybe he'd be in Budapest one day, and we'd run off to try and get there. But of course, we'd be 24 hours late by the time we got there. But in doing that journey, as I said, we were able to see how in just a week or so ahead of us as we traveled around, he was selling off his companies and he was selling off his assets in those various companies, putting them out of reach of the creditors here in Ireland, who we owed a lot of money to, and those that involved him setting up new offshore structures with secret ownership in places like Panama and the Seychelles. So we learned all of that stuff while chasing him around. And after about a year, we got lucky in the sense that rather than running, running off and arriving 24 hours late, we got a tip off that he would actually be in a certain place at a certain time. And that happened really because of Mr. Lynn's greed. Greed is one of the factors of this story throughout. Even though he maintained he wasn't in charge of his firms anymore, we knew he'd sold them off into secret ownership structures. But on the ground in Portugal, he was still controlling them. And one of his developments was in a place called Cabanesh near Tavira on the Portuguese Algarve. He had built 70 apartments there successfully before his businesses went wallop. And while on the run, he was seeking extra money from the residents there to give them access to the swimming pool in the resort. So that meant he had to have a meeting with them. And that meant I got tipped off about the meeting. And finally, after a year, we knew where he would be, and we managed to get ourselves there on time to meet him. And what happened then when you didn't meet him? Did he agree initially to sit down and talk to you? No. He came out of the meeting, we photographed him coming out, and I ran after him as he went towards his car. I told him who I was. He said, look, dude, I'm not going to give you an interview. Who do you take me for? I just asked him to go for a coffee. Initially, he made all sorts of excuses. But something clicked in his mind. And I think that's an important thing about his personality and his psychology. He is an impulsive individual. So while initially he had no intention of speaking to me at all, something clicked. And he just said, okay, let's go for a coffee. Once we went for a coffee, he spoke for an hour. And after the hour, I said, look, anything you've said there, what would be wrong with actually saying that in a real interview? And he kind of agreed. And he said, well, yeah, okay, let's do it. So that's that's that's how we got that interview, you know, ego again. Ego. Yeah, he does have an ego he likes. He's narcissistic. He likes the sound of his own voice. I think he likes being in the middle of drama. He feeds off that sort of that sort of situation. He likes to think he can always be in control in any situation. And he often can, you know, he's an interesting personality. He's a bit like a politician, a really, really good politician like a John F K or something. He's very clever, I think, but he can come down instantly to whatever level the person before him is at. So he can judge where they're at and come down instantly to that level and engage with them and make them like him. Right. That's how he sold hundreds of apartments up and down this country to everyday people like you and I, who lost all of their money when he did so. But they trusted him because he made them trust him. He's that kind of a guy, you know. And it wasn't just ordinary people who are looking for maybe to invest in a holy home or that he also stole from the banks. Yeah. Well, that's what he's been convicted for now. And that's what he's famous for. Lin was convicted in December last year at the second time around. The first trial was a hung jury was convicted of stealing 18 million euro from the various banks. And the way he did that was that he figured out or he was part or showed by various people in the banking industry that as the solicitor in the middle of a property deal, he could buy a house, act for himself, pledge to the bank that the money they were lending was being used for that house and that the bank would get the deeds to the house if anything went wrong. He was the man in the middle giving that undertaking as a trusted solicitor. So he realized that he could buy that house, pretend to give the undertaking or say he'd given the undertaking, get the money, do whatever he wanted with it. He would send it abroad in his case, and then do the same with the second bank and the third bank and a fourth bank. So there's a good example of that is Glen Lionhouse in Hawkes and Dublin was a big five million euro trophy home. So he got four point something million euro from first bank to buy that home. First bank thought they had recourse to that home and that he'd spent the money on that home. He did the same with the second bank and third bank and the fourth bank, but only one of those banks could ultimately have recourse to that home the rest of them lost all of their money. So in that way, he's been charged now and found guilty of stealing 18 million. But when he went on the run in 2007, the amount of money that was missing from the banks was actually 80 million, eight zero million. None of that has ever been really recovered. And in addition to that, by his own admission, when we met him, he owed or had been given 13 million by everyday investors who paid money for apartments yet to be built. And most of those people lost their money. He's only now been jailed, although he served a number of years in Brazil, in jail in Brazil before he was extradited. But then was back out of jail because he got released from Cloverhill. Yes, he was arrested in 2013 in Brazil. He had gone to seek refuge there at the time that the DPP finally laid charges against him in 2012. So he thought he was a free man high and dry in Brazil and he couldn't be extradited. And in many ways he was right at the time Ireland didn't have any extradition deal with Brazil. But he didn't bank on the fact that Alan Shatter was Justice Minister at the time and Mr. Shatter was a solicitor himself. So he particularly abhorred. He hated what Lynn had done for the reputation of solicitors. Shatter resolved to do something. So he went to cabinet and got a government agreement to set the Department of Foreign Affairs into negotiations with the Brazilian authorities to agree a reciprocal once off extradition deal. So that meant that we had someone, Brazilian citizen in prison here, we would send them back if the Brazilian authorities wanted them as long as we got one in return. And the one we wanted was Lynn. And until that deal was done, Lynn was high and dry and he may well have gotten away with this if it wasn't for Alan Shatter in place at that time. Then as you say, he resisted extradition at every step of the way. He stayed in the hellhole of a prison in Brazil for four and a half years fighting extradition. It's a horrible place. I've been there. It's a place where Lynn has described people were decapitated. It's run not by the prison guards but by chivalros or key holders who they're people with weapons and guns who control their little corner of the prison. And the prison guards really only control the front gate. So those are the conditions he was living in. Now, he was a little bit protected because as a professional, there's a separate section of the prison in the corner that's a little bit better than the normal prison conditions. But still, he faced grave dangers in there and he had a tough time. And he stayed there for four and a half years fighting extradition every step of the way. Siring children, two of his four Brazilian-born children were sired inside the prison during conjugal visits. And he would argue to the Supreme Court in Brazil that he shouldn't be extradited because his children were Brazilian-born. But ultimately, all of his bids failed and he was extradited in 2018 to face justice here. COVID got in the way. The first trial didn't happen until 2022. It was a very long trial. It began in February. It ended in June and it resulted in a hung jury. So the authorities went again last year and finally, the end of last year, after a two-month trial, he was sentenced to 16 years in prison headline sentence. But he had that sentence reduced because of the time he'd spent in prison in Brazil. So ultimately, he'd be out in four, four and a half years from now. And what do you think is going to become of him in four years' time? Or maybe more to the pointer, better question to ask is what's going to become of all the money that hasn't been accounted for? Well, this is interesting because I described at the start how when I was trying to get in front of him, we were discovering how he was siphoning away his assets beyond the reach of the authorities and beyond the reach of creditors. Now, 16 years later, 17 years later, the authorities are investigating what has become of that money. And they began a money laundering investigation into Mr. Lin and his wife, Breed Murphy, during the trial last year because they realized that he had moved into a new house in Wicklow that had been bought by a company which is being run by an associate of his who is the same person on lots of the paperwork dating back to 07 and 08 that was helping him to disseminate the assets into secret offshore locations. So the guards started that investigation during his trial and they got court orders in secret to access the bank accounts of three or four companies that that individual is running, that Bulgarian individual is running here in Ireland. These are new companies set up in the last two years engaging in the property business. And the guards could see who was accessing the funds in those companies and those company accounts and those bank accounts, they could see who was withdrawing money from ATMs, for example. So they suspect that Mr. Lin has been able to to launder back several of the millions he stole back into the country and was gone back into the property business even during his own trial. But that's an ongoing investigation and they may or may not prove that if they do and you ask what's going to happen to Mr. Lin, if they do prove that Mr. Lin will face another 14 years in jail for money laundering. And so could his wife who was also a focus of this investigation. And you got to you got to wonder about the guy because he's been on the run now for 17 years and had he just put his hands up in 2007. I'm not sure he would have done any time and given what happened in the Celtic Tiger and let me now know about what was going on back then. I think he could easily by now have been back in business. But he made the wrong choice. Something in him ran instead of facing up to his responsibilities and here we are. Here we are indeed. Well, it's all outlined in detail and it is an amazing and remarkable story and some of the facts are mind blown. We've just sort of skimmed the surface, if you like, in our chat. It's called Fugitive, the Michael Lin story and it's the true story of the epic hunt to bring one of Ireland's most notorious fugitives to justice and about sums it up. Michael O'Farrell, thank you. Thank you. Get with the best. Virgin Media, Ireland's best broadband with full fiber and speeds of two gig.