MIKE EDGEWORTH’S CRASH LANDING-article from Phoenix Magazine
PILOT SCHOOL boss Mike Edgeworth has been feeling the heat following the news that his Waterford-based company, Pilot Training College Ltd (PTC), has left 34 trainee pilots stranded in Florida, some of whom have paid up to €85,000 for the privilege. Now Goldhawk can reveal that the Edgeworth family went on a big spending spree in early 2008, and bought up 13 houses on a new housing estate in Waterford. And at the end of 2010, PTC had accumulates losses of €2.8m.Documents lodged with theLand Registry show
that in February and March of 2008, Edgeworth bought 11 houses on an estate called Poplar Drive, in Butlerstown just outside Waterford city. This is
located near the Waterford Institute of Technology and about a 20-minute drive from Waterford Airport, where Edgeworth’s PTC is based. Poplar Drive consists of detached three and four-bed houses and one house in this estate recently went on the market with an asking price of €255,000. Edgeworth took out mortgages from Anglo Irish Bank to fund these purchases.
Land Registry files also show that Edgeworth’s children – Ruth (23), Laura (29) and George (31) – also each bought a house in Poplar Drive in 2008, although these purchases were funded through banks other than Anglo. The children are all directors on various Mike Edgeworth-companies. Land Registry files also show that back in 2003, Mike Edgeworth and his wife Ann re-mortgaged their Co Kildare family home with a €1⁄2m mortgage from Bank of Scotland.
In recent media interviews Edgeworth
– who in 2010 was the chairman of the judging panel for the Rose of Tralee – gave no indication that PTC was experiencing financial difficulty. In an interview for The Irish Times last March, he spoke instead about how PTC had just won a major new contract with Gulf Aviation Academy to train 150 cadets over two years, worth €12m. However, the latest accounts filed for PTC – made to the end of 2010 – show that the company had accumulated losses of €2.8m, although it recorded a profit of €135,000 in that financial year.
A company called Shemburn Ltd is the group company for various Edgeworth- related vehicles (ie assorted aviation companies in the UK and Ireland). The latest accounts here showed that Shemburn lost €255,000 in 2010 and had a deficit in shareholders’ funds of more than €1m. A note in those accounts – signed off in August 2011 – states that the company nvolved in a legal action in the Netherlands in which it is being sued by a former contractor named Rene Dijkshoorn, who is claiming €133,000 in respect of unpaid charges of two aircraft and €28,000 over unpaid invoices for replacement engines. Shemburn has lodged a counterclaim for €117,000 for breach of contract against Dijkshoorn.
PTC is not the first time Edgeworth has been involved with a company that has ran into difficulty. In the 1990s, he was the director of a telecommunications company called Alternative Telecommunications Services Ltd – which was active in Russia – although this collapsed into liquidation in 2000. One of the notable directors here was the former Fianna Fáil minister David Andrews, who had stepped down from the board in 1997.