Stories
Visitors to Bective Stud are soon greeted by the strikingly spectacular sculpted spectacle of two horses, dancing together in beautiful unison.
Procured at the Chelsea Flower Show for X amount and shipped over to County Meath for Y amount, it tells you a little and a lot about Noel and Valerie Moran, racing’s up and coming powerhouse couple. Moran, a proud native of the Royal County, comes across as a humble man, despite his enormous wealth.
Moran, 51, left school at 17 and got a job in the bank. He worked in various back-office jobs for 19 years but came to specialise in cards and payments. So he would make his fortune.
However, he and Valerie aspire to big things in the sport of Kings, one which will soon be without the patronage of Michael O’Leary, the Ryanair boss seemingly on a one-way ticket out of ownership. It’s 14 years since the Morans set up a company called Prepaid Financial Solutions (PFS) around their London kitchen table. Millionaires many times over, they want Bective, a 180-acre estate with 55 stables, to reflect that no expense is spared in a fledgling breeding operation.
Given the money the Morans have invested, their return so far has been relatively modest, but racing will soon be ever-more familiar with the Navan man and his Zimbabwean wife. And, with today marking the return of Gordon Elliott runners after his six-month suspension for being photographed sitting on a dead horse, Noel Moran has nothing but words and financial support for his friend and ally.
“We talk every couple of days,” he told The Currency. “Gordon made a mistake, he’s served his time. We’ve renewed our sponsorship of his yard. It’s an exciting season coming up for us all.”
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Johnny Ward: Tell us about how you got into racing.
Noel Moran: When were are growing up here in Navan, it’s easy to get into racing. My father was big into sport and racing. As a kid I played football and also went racing to Navan, as you do around here. We’d have had a leg of this horse or that and it developed into more down the years.
JW: Gaelic games is a big deal for you too.
NM: We’d be involved with a few local clubs. We sponsor the Meath ladies’ camogie team. Valerie and I were away for a week in Scotland when Meath ladies’ team won the All-Ireland but what a brilliant win that was! A fantastic achievement to come from where they’ve come from, and that’s coming off the back of the minors winning three weeks ago too. We’ve been starved of all-Ireland appearances and Leinster appearances but, both between girls and underage, there’s something for the future. I played with my local club in Navan since I was nine or ten. We’re also about to do something with local underage in Meath for next year. It’s good to be in a position to help out and invest something back in the younger generation.
JW: Tell us about your first horse.
NM: A horse called River Tarquin. Myself, my brother Sean and my father [John] had a leg in him back in the late ’80s and early ’90s. He won eight races and to win the Troytown, the big race at our local track in Navan, was great. He won what is now the Paddy Power Chase at Leopardstown in 1992. He was our first horse and it was a local syndicate who spent small enough money. You’re hooked then. You think it’s easy!
I moved to England about 22 years ago and got involved in a few horses but nothing too serious. When we started to move back to Ireland it was a good opportunity to get involved and buy our first horses directly.
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Moran returned with his fortune made. Crowned European Entrepreneur of the Year in 2018, he was then chief executive of Prepaid Financial Services (PFS), an alternative banking business he and Valerie concocted from their kitchen table in London during the middle of the financial crash.
In late 2019, the couple announced the sale of PFS for €327 million to the Australian payments company EML, in a deal that gave the couple a payout of €266 million. That was a high point. Three months later, before the sale completed, Covid struck, and PFS’s purchasers were able to negotiate a €105 million discount on the sale price.
One year after that, a bombshell letter from the Central Bank of Ireland informed EML that PFS was under investigation for potential breaches of the money laundering / know your customer rules. The news wiped out about half the value of EML’s shares. The market is still waiting to discover what was found within PFS, how big the liability will be, and how much of it will be borne by the original shareholders.
But regardless of the outcome, it’s safe to say the Morans did well out of the sale. And they had money to spend.
NM: We went to Gordon Elliott and asked to source a horse or two for us. The first one broke his leg at the first or second flight in his second race. He didn’t last too long. Gordon said: ‘It’s a bad start, but I’d like to keep you on board; we should go halves on the next one or two and take it from there.’
Gordon’s very honest: if the horse is no good he doesn’t want to train him or burden owners with horses that have no chance of winning for him. He’ll tell you where you stand at any point in time or tell you when to move them on.
We are lucky we have the money to invest in horses. We sold all our business so we have some money to invest in it. If you are going to invest you want to get the best horses around. When we were going into it, we may as well buy better quality and that was our starting point. After the first horse, we got on very well. The second one was Swingbridge, who recorded six wins and was very consistent.
JW: Did Valerie have an interest in horses?
NM: None at all. They do have a Tote in Zimbabwe she tells me, so they have some betting on horses, but she was delighted to get involved in it; she probably hadn’t much say as we were doing it anyway! She loves it. There’s a couple of different elements and we are in it a lot for the social side. We’ve multiple different things going on, with long hours in our business, and it’s a release; it’s great to get a day out at the races.
We met through the business. She was a runner in her younger days. I guess in sport it was running for her. Racing was something new, something different. She loves to be involved in it.
JW: Tell us about Bective Stud.
NM: That kind of happened by default; there was no plan around it. We were home from England one weekend and I noticed that there was a local place for sale. I was familiar with the place and the sale happened very quickly. And so it was that we secured Bective House, a large estate that many years ago had a horsey background. It had some stables but was very much dilapidated. It had been let go for ten or 15 years. So we could see the potential for it but we had moved back from England and had the means to acquire it.
The work is ongoing. It’s a huge project: 180 acres. There’s an old period house, a couple of other houses on the estate and a stud farm. There were derelict stables, overgrown everything; we’ve totally renovated the place. Everything is new: paddocks, roads, 55 stables, walkers, a gallop. It took us three years to get there and only at the end of this year we’ll finish the stud. We’d always planned to move back to Ireland.
JW: Quite a change: London to rural Ireland.
NM: There are pros and cons to it, one extreme to another: London to Bective. There’s peace, there is tranquility here, but in London you had the choice of shopping and restaurants. Valerie misses the shopping end of it I’d say; on the other side she likes the peace and quiet that Bective brings. We will still regularly go back to London.
JW: The pandemic looks a bit of a boon for rural Ireland in ways.
NM: You’d imagine so. Nobody is travelling to offices now. It’s hard to know how that will bounce back when we are allowed back into offices. There will be a lot of reluctance. Working from home will become the norm.
JW: Who’s running the stud day to day?
NM: Michael Lynam. He worked for Coolmore and others and he has five or six others, some part- and some full-time. The stud is soon well set up to cater for what we’d like to do. As for training, I’ve no ambitions whatsoever. I’ll leave that to Gordon and Ollie.
JW: Ah yes, Ollie Murphy. He served his time at Gordon’s before taking out his license in England.
NM: We know him from Gordon when we were involved with him. We have six horses with Ollie; maybe one nice one; they are all young horses really.
JW: Prize-money in Britain is surely a major issue. Look at the tiny field sizes at the British meets only last Monday.
NM: I was actually looking at that too. There’s a huge difference between prize-money there and here. It really doesn’t incentivise you to send a horse across from here as even if you win the race you are barely breaking even for the month alone. Most of the prize money in Britain is three or four grand and unless you are winning graded races you have no chance of breaking even at all.
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John Magnier’s behemoth, Coolmore, is not so well known for the jumps aspect of its breeding operation, but it has some of the best sires in that sphere too. When record-breaking mare Apple’s Jade, owned by Michael O’Leary and trained both by Willie Mullins and Gordon Elliott, went for sale online at the Goffs National Hunt Sale in December, Coolmore was confident of acquiring her.
Whilst she was in foal to exciting stallion Walk In The Park, there was and is no guarantee whatever a winner of 11 Grade 1s will do well as a mother.
A record would not be only broken but demolished. The previous record for a jumps mare to be sold at auction was held by the unbeaten Feathard Lady, who was purchased for 270,000gns at the Doncaster August Sale in 2007 by Graham Wylie. And it was Elliot who struck the winning bid on his friend’s behalf, a cool €530,000. Noel had outmuscled Coolmore.
JW: Tell us about the mares you have.
NM: We are up to seven mares now. Michael [Lynam] started us off with one or two from connections he had. We were lucky we got Apple’s Jade; hopefully, she is the best one. Others were acquired privately. It’s the better quality of mare we are looking for. We’ve foals from this year, yearlings, two- and three-year-olds; so we’ll have our own first runners next year, the first of ours bred in Bective.
It’s such a long process, very different to the Flat, which may take two years; with jumpers, it can take five years. It’s a long-drawn-out process, of course, but it’s rewarding to breed them yourselves; all the better if you are successful. I follow the Flat I’ve but very little interest relative to National Hunt. There are obstacles to jump; it’s more entertaining than a Flat race.
JW: Apple’s Jade can only be the apple of your eye.
NM: We’ll never see the like of her again maybe, with 11 wins at the top. If her offspring are half as good as her, hopefully, we’ll get some Grade 1s out of it, but we all know it doesn’t necessarily work out like that. The first foal she has had is a very nice filly, coming along very well; fingers crossed she gets to the racetrack in four years’ time. She is also in foal to Crystal Ocean this year for a foal next year.
She settled in very well and took to mothering very well; she nearly did it by herself, to be honest. We had a lot of people on standby but she didn’t need any help! She took to it like a duck to water; she’s enjoying herself up there. The whole breeding thing is an unknown: you match them to the ones they are best suited to and cross your fingers it works out.
JW: It must be lovely to be able to call to her and the other horses.
NM: Bective is only up the road from where we live. We are up there almost every day, with lots of things going on even outside of the stud. We’re always involved. We are just in the process of setting up a website for Bective, with social media linked to that.
JW: Tell us about your notable horses.
NM: We’ve a couple of nice ones coming up, four- and five-year-olds as well as the established horses. Zanahiyr was our best performer last year and he was unlucky not to win at Punchestown in the four-year-olds’ Grade 1. He’s still only a baby; we hope he definitely has improved over the summer, to be bigger and stronger this year with a lot of potential.
Queens Brook had a mixed season, winning her first run but getting injured. She’s a lot better this year I think; she has a lot of potential. Grand Roi won a graded race for us but is only a young horse who will stay hurdling this year.
Ginto is the one I am looking forward to a lot. He ran twice last year, second at Navan, and then won a bumper. He has improved over the summer; he’s only a five-year-old, we hope he is definitely one to look forward to this year for sure. Hollow Games is unbeaten and will go hurdling. He could be an exciting one.
JW: In March you paid £220,000 for point-to-point bumper winner Au Fleuron at the Tattersalls Cheltenham March Sale.
NM: He’s exciting and we’ve one or two unnamed ones, three-year-olds we got in the last sales events.
JW: What are your ambitions?
NM: Ultimately it is to try and have Grade 1 winners, but it is also to enjoy it. We get a lot of enjoyment from going to the Festivals, having a good day out and that’s nearly half the battle. A Graded winner is brilliant, a Grade 1 winner better again, but the ultimate is a Cheltenham winner and we all aim for that.
It is the pinnacle. That is my favourite meeting, the one you try to wind all the horses up for. We are looking forward to racing here in Ireland, to go back to the local tracks. We were at the Galway Festival and we will go to Listowel this month too. At the races, people will introduce themselves and we will have a chat. The racing community is very small and everyone nearly knows everyone. You get to meet other people and I think you’d have to say the owners are looked after well in Ireland for sure. The prize-money is very hard to argue against. It’s the, best prize-money and set-up available and that’s why English owners have horses over here.
JW: There’s more to your life than racing.
NM: We’ve a couple of other businesses that take up half our time, the horse part is only 15 to 20 per cent of our time.
JW: Gordon Elliott returns with runners today.
NM: It’s great to have him back. Sport and racing will far better for having him back, being honest. He has served his time, everyone deserves a second chance and I hope everyone gives him that second chance. We are delighted to have stuck with him as we know the care and attention the horses get every time we go over. He made a mistake, an exception rather than the norm. He’s 260 to 270 horses back in training.
JW: There was a human cost as well.
NM: That’s the thing people didn’t see. He’s a human at the end of the day who took a personal attack from everyone, globally. It mushroomed out of control and he didn’t deserve that; it was a pity the way it went. He held his hand up and took his punishment. He loves to train horses and train winners and he should get back to that as that’s what he is good at. If something is photographed now or recorded, it can be distributed globally within minutes.
JW: You’ve sponsored his yard again.
NM: Yes, through our company, Ecomm Merchant Solutions. Hopefully, he can get back to training winners, No doubt it was a tough time for him. We go over to him regularly and he calls to Bective. We talk every couple of days about something, to be honest. All of his owners supported him with the exception of one or two. There’s a lot for us to be excited about.
