A lot of gangsters around my area have partners who run cash businesses like nail bars and beauty salons, I've no idea where they got the idea from:
This, allegedly?
Celia sells two salons and goes back to her roots in the capital
Ronald Quinlan
September 21 2008 04:48 AM
CELIA Larkin, the former partner of ex-Taoiseach Bertie Ahern, has sold her two beauty salons in Limerick to a local businesswoman for an undisclosed sum.
The Sunday Independent understands Ms Larkin disposed of both salons -- Beauty at the Blue Door at the Castletroy Park Hotel and Calm at the Limerick Marriott -- in July.
Both concerns are now owned and operated by a Ms Nadia Wright.
Ms Larkin is once again understood to be focussing her efforts on running her remaining Dublin salon, Beauty at the Blue Door in Drumcondra.
News of the sale of her Limerick-based businesses will come as something of a surprise to many given the fact that Ms Larkin only recently moved to a new home in the picturesque Clare town of Killaloe.
The sale also comes just seven months after the well- known beauty consultant opened the second of her Midwest salons, Calm, in the Marriott Hotel on Limerick's Henry Street.
Commenting on that occasion, Ms Larkin appeared set to further expand her business, rather than sell it off.
Asked at the time if her former life partner, then Taoiseach Bertie Ahern, would perform the salon's official opening, as he had for her Beauty at the Blue Door at the Castletroy Park Hotel, Ms Larkin seemed quietly determined.
"I just put an ad in the local paper and opened the doors. I want to build the business that way," she said. "It is hard work, like all businesses are hard work, but I am enjoying running Calm in Limerick and Beauty at the Blue Door in Dublin."
Yesterday, Ms Larkin was back in Drumcondra and busy at work, attending to clients in her remaining salon.
Asked by the Sunday Independent to comment on her recent decision to downsize her business, she declined.
Ms Larkin's 08 registered Mercedes C180 Kompressor parked outside would suggest she is still in a relatively comfortable financial position.
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A spokeswoman for Ms Wright, meanwhile, confirmed that the Limerick businesswoman had taken over Ms Larkin's two salons, but declined to comment further.
Outside of her personal professional interests, Celia Larkin continues to make headlines as a consequence of her previous long-running relationship with Mr Ahern.
Only last week, the Mahon Tribunal turned its attention once more to a lodgement of £28,772.90 Ms Larkin made to her account in the AIB Bank in December 1994.
The tribunal had already heard the money was the proceeds of Stg£30,000 Manchester businessman Michael Wall had brought to Dublin to assist with the purchase of a house in Drumcondra, which Bertie Ahern would later come to own.
Last Friday, the Cork developer Owen O'Callaghan told the tribunal he had absolutely no knowledge of the lodgement made by Ms Larkin to the AIB when questioned on the matter.
The issue of the lodgement arose in the context of claims by developer Tom Gilmartin that Mr O'Callaghan told him of having paid Bertie Ahern in return for granting tax designation for a shopping centre in Athlone in 1994.
Mr O'Callaghan strongly denies the claims made by Mr Gilmartin.
The depth of Celia Larkin's relationship with the former Taoiseach and the intricacies of their personal and professional ties were exposed further at the Mahon Tribunal earlier this year when it emerged that Ms Larkin had received a loan of £30,000 from Dublin Central constituency funds in the 1990s to assist with the purchase of a house on behalf of her elderly aunts. The money -- which has since been repaid -- was drawn from the bank account of the O'Donovan Rossa Cumann Trust House Committee chaired by Bertie Ahern.
Mr Ahern for his part, has told the Mahon Tribunal he had no knowledge of the loan being given to Ms Larkin.
Purchased for £40,100, the house on Dublin's North Circular Road is now worth in the region of €1m and is registered in Ms Larkin's name. Her surviving aunt and Beauty at the Blue Door co-director Alice Minogue lives there still.
Ms Larkin has also been the focus of much attention -- and criticism -- over her appointment in 2005 by Mr Ahern to the board of the National Consumer Agency.
I couldn't find anything on Nadia Wright, perhaps she moved to the Cayman Islands.
