Is this the end? More money problems for Sean Gallagher

He was once the front-runner for the presidency, but Sean Gallagher’s campaign is falling to pieces in light of even more shady financial revelations.

Having attempted to defend an interest-free loan of almost nearly €83,000 as an eh, accounting error last week, the Irish Independent have today revealed that the Dragon’s Den cueball shared a payout of almost €860,000 with a business partner from his Smarthomes company while it was on its knees at the height of the property crash in 2008 and 2009.

Gallagher and his business partner received the payments in 2008 and 2009 while his company was hemorrhaging cash and its investors were left browned off as to the lack of return on their input.

What’s more, the total sum was more than the accumulated amount of €830,000 that Smarthomes received from state agencies after its establishment and equalled almost 75 per cent of Smarthomes’ total loss over the two-year period.

Put simply, Gallagher has a lot of explaining to do, but he wasn’t in the mood to do so when contacted by the paper last night and instead let his company do all the talking for him.

Predictably, they rushed to his defence and said: "The remuneration at the time for the directors was in line with the level of business the company was carrying out."

It’s a line of the sort we have heard too often in relation to those who have put the country into the state it’s in at the moment and the latest revelations are likely to be the final death knell in Gallagher’s presidential bid, which had looked in fine fettle up until recent days.

Despite the role of the president being that of an ambassador, Gallagher has bigged up his business acumen and track record as an entrepreneur to try and sway voters, who are hardly likely to be impressed by his latest shady dealings.

With the rest of the candidates falling by the wayside and self-sabotaging their own campaigns, it looks as if it’s frail old Michael D’s to lose.