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Jp macmanus

80 winners at Cheltenham, including the 2025 Gold Cup winner. On top of: 6 CH winners; another GC winner; and 3 GN winners.

Where do you want me to stop? Bloke is a total legend, and great for the sport. What’s the beef?
 
JP McManus and the Glackin Report

For anyone who has not gone near this before, the Glackin Report examined the sale of the Johnston Mooney & O’Brien Ballsbridge site to Telecom Éireann in the late eighties and early nineties.

What it found about McManus was not complicated.

He provided a £1.5m loan through a Jersey account in the name “J & N McMahon” to Chestvale Properties, the company used to buy the site.

When Telecom Éireann bought the site for roughly £9.4m, he was one of the people who shared in the profit.

The report stated he received £500,000 in cash as his portion. It put it plainly:

“I can find no evidence that any other person received the cash of £500,000 and find accordingly that it was received by Mr McManus.”

That sentence matters. He denied benefiting. The State investigator said he did.

Despite how politically charged the affair became, no criminal charges were brought against him or anyone involved.

Readers can make their own judgement, but that is what the report actually recorded and what it says about The Great Man’s relationship with the truth.
 
“I can find no evidence that any other person received the cash of £500,000 and find accordingly that it was received by Mr McManus.”

On the face of it that seems rather a strange judgement. You might equally say “I can find no evidence that it was received by JPM and find accordingly that it was received by some other person.”
 
It's old news and certainly very little to do with whether he can get a winner.

This stuff goes on everyday, all day, all over the world anyway, it's pretty run of the mill stuff to people involved in high finance.
 
The wording only looks strange if you ignore the context. McManus denied receiving the cash. Glackin examined the trail and wrote that he did.

That is the State contradicting him.
You can minimise it as “run of the mill high finance” if you like, but you cannot pretend the report did not reject his account.

And it matters because racing leans heavily on the myth of The Great Man.
When the only time the State scrutinised him it concluded he was not telling the truth, it tells you something about the type of operator you are dealing with.
 
I read the original question as to whether he breeds any winners or just buys them. I have no idea if there are tax breaks for unsuccessful studs.

As a punter, it has always amused me that some coups are condemned and some are lauded. Presumably, this is on the back of whether Joe Bloggs got his money down at a good price but it has always seemed to me that, in betting, there are always winners and losers and a blind eye is more likely to be shown to some than to others.

As an owner, I definitely resent the (legal) manipulation of multiple entries that deny other connections a run.
 
The Great Man is one of the biggest cheats that racing has ever lauded. His operation is essentially organised crime.
 
As I've said (bored everyone) with many times, I like racing and betting for the racing and betting, NOT for the people in racing and betting and this is a case in point.

I'm just not interested in the bloke - I don't care how much money he's got (the wealth of others is a sad obsession for many) or how he got it.

Never met him, never want to, and imagine him to be like Dermot Desmond (who I have met and didn't like one bit) as these self-made wealthy financiers tend to be of a type.

Tbf to him, way back in the day, as a much younger man, my Dad and I watched him interviewed by Julian Wilson after McManus's (sic) Millers Hill landed a gamble at the Cheltenham Festival.

"I hear you've hit the bookies hard," Wilson fawned over him.

"They know about it," was McManus's nicely-understated reply.

My Dad thought that was a cool reply and teenage me agreed.

But that's as good as it ever got.

He has more horses than he could probably name and keeps a lot of people in racing in a job - but none of those people is me, nor would I ever allow that to be the case, so I really couldn't give a f***k what the bloke says or does ever tbh.
 

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