THE father of the Cork man who has just become the most powerful unelected person in Britain was once arrested and charged with a £1.2m (€1.4m) luxury car scam, the Irish Mail on Sunday can reveal.
Tim McSweeney – father of Downing Street’s new Chief of Staff, Morgan McSweeney – also has a criminal assault conviction related to an incident involving his son.
The behind-the-scenes rise of Morgan McSweeney from a small-town upbringing in Macroom in Co. Cork to Keir Starmer’s right hand man in Downing Street, has been the subject of endless fascination.
This intrigue has been amplified by the fact that the notoriously private 47-year-old had been virtually unknown until he masterminded the Labour Party’s landslide general election victory in July.
But now an MoS review of publicly-available historical records can shed new light on the upbringing and childhood of Morgan McSweeney.
Those records show his father Tim McSweeney – an accountant by profession – became embroiled in an extraordinary criminal and civil case during his son’s formative teenage years.
The international tale of deceit is laced with compelling characters that include an attractive ex-model with an exclusive Chelsea address and superb establishment contacts and a shadowy European security expert with an assumed name who was wanted by police in Belgium.
The former model, Amanda Forshall, was in the business of supplying houses, antiques, fine art and exotic sports cars to wealthy Japanese clients.
In 1990, she even sold a a Bugatti Royal Kellner – one of the world’s most expensive cars – for $15m. That sale involved the now-deceased Lord Montague of Beaulieu, an infamous bisexual car enthusiast.
The mysterious Belgian, meanwhile, was known as William Hoogenbruggen, though his real name was Fabien Sargent.
Astonishingly, these characters all wound up together in Macroom in 1990 where Tim McSweeney managed the Irish Nationwide Building Society from a premises in Castle Street.
At the time, Tim McSweeney was also a partner with O’Brien, Cahill & Co Chartered Accountants, a firm with several offices throughout Cork county and city.
But he had other interests too. The first public indication of a relationship between Tim McSweeney and William Hoogenbruggen, aka Fabien Sargent, came in a Sunday World article in February 1990.
At the time, Morgan McSweeney, a sports-obsessed teenager, who did not particularly excel at school, would have been just 13.
According to the article, the pair had teamed up to set up a Macroom factory where Lamborghinis and other exotic cars were to be bullet-proofed with armoured plating for VIPs.
‘The US Justice Department are very interested in taking about 1,000 cars with around 700 for South America,’ the Belgian told the newspaper.
Tim McSweeney said: ‘Saudi princes are another great market for bulletproof cars’.
The article included a photo of a Lamborghini about to be bullet-proofed at the new Macroom plant but it did not mention the name of the new company behind the enterprise. But Company Registrations Office (CRO) records show that just two months previously, in December 1989, a new firm called Lambo Motors Ltd was incorporated at the Castle Street address used by Tim McSweeney.
From the beginning, Tim McSweeney was a director of Lambo Motors Ltd while others associated with the firm included Hoogenbruggen, aka Fabien Sargent and a third individual called Gerard Walsh.
Aside from his role at Lambo Motors, Gerard Walsh is himself a notorious figure who was once dubbed a ‘fraudster’ by the courts in Jersey, though he has always denied any wrongdoing.
CRO records show things developed quickly at Lambo Motors. Too quickly in fact. Within 10 months the firm would be in receivership.
But in that brief period, Lambo Motors got Tim McSweeney and Gerard Walsh into a legal and criminal quagmire that lasted nearly a decade and saw them both jailed on bail in Brixton prison.
CRO paperwork shows that six months after Lambo Motors was incorporated, Tim McSweeney signed a letter of undertaking with Bank of Ireland to agree a £200,000 line of credit secured against a local property.
At the time, his brother Michael McSweeney – an uncle to the then 13-year-old Morgan – was a manager with Bank of Ireland in Bandon.
Two weeks after securing the BOI funds, Tim McSweeney signed a second document – a chattel mortgage with the Mercantile Credit Company of Ireland – relating to four Ferraris and a Lamborghini.
Then, thanks to a chance encounter at a London supercar dealership and a subsequent trip to Ireland, Amanda Forstall entered the frame.
Already notorious in car circles from her $15m Bugatti sale, she now had a new client with a special order and the money to pay for it.
The client – Mr Hisa Seki – was in turn a middleman for a wealthy Japanese individual who wanted to purchase nine Lamborghini Diablo cars. The name Diablo, meaning devil in Italian, was perhaps a sign of what was to come.
Seizing on the opportunity, those at Lambo Motors leapt into action.
Soon they had convinced Mrs Forshall that their firm – a newly-established company in the sleepy Cork village of Macroom – had become a Lamborghini concessionaire.
This impression was created in various ways; Forshall was shown documents and company letterheads with the Lamborghini logo. She was also shown a set of accounts showing a healthy financial position.
There was a reference too, from Michael McSweeney, written on Bank of Ireland notepaper from the Bandon branch, to the effect that William Hoogenbruggenwas ‘a respected customer’ whose ‘cheques have always been honoured.’
And there was a phone call – one in which Michael McSweeney confirmed that Lambo Motors were the Irish concessionaires for Lamborghini.
Ultimately, the courts would later rule that Michael McSweeney – ad not told ‘conscious untruths’.
There would be a harsher verdict for Tim McSweeney and his partner Gerard Walsh, who were both found to have acted fraudulently.
But back then Amanda Forshall did not know she was being duped.
Convinced by what she’d been told, she signed a £1,233,000 contract with Lambo Motors in the name of her Virgin Islands-based company, Fine Art and Collections Ltd. She would go on to pay over £677,000 for the first five cars – .
But the deal was a scam and on September 3, 1990 – just 10 months after its foundation – the Mercantile Credit Company of Ireland – sent in receivers to Lambo Motors to secure any assets left.
The receivers quickly took possession of the four Ferraris the bank had funded and later auctioned them off for £107,200.
It is not known what became of the single Lamborghini the bank had funded but it was not present to be seized when the receivers moved in. In March 1991, Mrs Forshall sued and obtained a High Court judgement for the money she had paid out.
With interest included, this left Tim McSweeney and Gerard Walsh on the hook for close to £1m.
In May 1991, Tim McSweeney’s accountancy firm disowned him in a public ad published in the Irish Examiner newspaper.
‘O’Brien, Cahill & Co Chartered Accountantswish to advise that Mr Timothy McSweeney, Macroom Co. Cork is no longer a member of this firm,’ the ad read.
Later, the Irish Nationwide Building Society, would take out its own ad to announce it had parted ways with the disgraced accountant.
The story might have ended there. But it didn’t .
Instead it took a twist – one that saw Tim McSweeney arrested, charged and temporarily banished from returning home to Ireland.
In June 1991, Mrs Forshall was arrested and questioned for a day at Chelsea police station over an allegation she had ‘solicited the murder of Mr Hisa Seki – the Japanese middleman she was buying the Lamborghini cars for .
‘It was part of a nightmare,’ she later testified. ‘The police listened to me and there was no charge brought. It was the result of a man called Richardson who worked for me because I was frightened for my own life being arrested with a shotgun.’
The origin of this bizarre episode remains unclear but the questioning of Mrs Forshall appears to have prompted a criminal investigation into her Lamborghini deal with Lambo Motors.
And on October 5 1991, this resulted in Tim McSweeney’s arrest in London.
On the same day, Gerard Walsh was also arrested at the Bambridge Hotel in Northern
Ireland when he attended to meet Mrs Forshall. The meeting had been due to occur at a Dublin hotel but in an apparent ruse to secure an arrest the meeting was switched at the last minute to the North.
Both men were immediately charged with conspiring with William Hoogenbruggen to dishonestly obtain £1,233,000 in cash by deception from Mrs Forshall.
As Scotland Yard hunted around the world for Hoogenbruggen, Tim McSweeney and Gerard Walsh were both remanded in Brixton prison until they could raise enough funds for bail.
By early December 1991, they had both been released on strict conditions which included handing over their passports, remaining in the UK and signing on at a police station several times a week.
By now, with his father an accused criminal on bail in London, a young Morgan McSweeney, would have been approaching the age of 15.
In March 1992, Tim McSweeney and his co-accused were allowed to return to Ireland, pending further hearings. Later that year magistrates ruled there was a prima facia criminal case to answer.
However, various delays ensued and the fraud trial did not commence until 1994 – the same year a 17-year-old Morgan McSweeney boarded a bus to emigrate to a new life in London.
Tim McSweeney, though, failed to show up for his trial and the court was informed he was ill.
But it subsequently emerged that the day after the trial began he flew to Malaga – via London – as warrants for his arrest were being issued but had not yet been served in Ireland.
Mr McSweeney returned from Spain a few days later when the arrest warrants were withdrawn and ultimately the trial was dropped by the prosecution in March 1994.
But Tim McSweeney’s family were still punished for his failure to attend. In April 1994 the courts ruled that the £25,000 bail money his brother Dennis had paid would be forfeited.
Meanwhile, back in Ireland the civil judgement against Tim McSweeney and Gerard Walsh was contested to the Supreme Court which, in 1998, upheld the original High Court ruling.
Even after the Lamborghini case concluded, Tim McSweeney still occupied a life that sailed perilously close to controversy.
In 1999 he surfaced in the midst of what was then dubbed Sunderland’s biggest financial scandal when financial consultant Anthony Heald fled owing £30m to investors.
In pursuing Heald, investors traced him to Cork where Tim McSweeney, who was Heald’s accountant, acted as a go-between.
Neither Tim McSweeney, nor his son Morgan responded to queries from the MOS about this article this weekend.
