Jay Bourke
THE hits keep coming for Goldhawk’s old pal, one-time restaurant impresario Jay Bourke. Not even a year since the taxman slapped him with a judgment for €325,000, the Revenue has whacked him again, this time for €33,000.
Fans of Goldhawk will be well aware that Bourke’s relationship with the taxman has been less than friendly. In 2008, his Sherland Entertainments Ltd settled with the Revenue for €160,000 in relation to under-declared VAT. For his part, Bourke said that he had “no sense of shame about it”, adding that the state should build a statue to him given how much moolah he had forked out over the years.
Then there was the small matter of Shebeen Chic Ltd, the company behind his Dublin 2 boozer, which was wound up by the Revenue in 2012. He was restricted from acting as a company director last summer for his behaviour at Shebeen, where liquidator PJ Lynch said Bourke continued to trade despite the entity being insolvent (see The Phoenix, 3/11/17).
The High Court had heard that around 2011 Bourke entered into an arrangement with the Revenue to pay back a portion of his €105,000 VAT liability. Eventually, Lynch discovered that this debt was actually owed by Eden Restaurant, a solvent business that Bourke had operated as a sole trader, but had transferred it to the insolvent Shebeen company.
