Declan Ganley - Business Life

Business Life

After leaving school, he initially worked on building sites in London but soon found a job as a tea boy at an insurance company. His business life started soon afterwards when he moved to the Soviet Union. He traded in Soviet aluminium which he shipped to Rotterdam via Latvia.

Ganley is the current CEO and Chairman of Rivada Networks, a US-based firm specialising in the provision of telecommunications systems to the military, police and emergency services in disaster situations. In the past, he has been involved in business ventures selling Russian aluminium and in the Latvian forestry sector. In the early 1990s Mr Ganley founded Kipelova Forestry Enterprises which became one of the largest forestry companies in the Russian Federation. He sold the company in 1997. In 1996, his company Ganley International founded the Anglo-Adriatic Investment Fund, an Albanian financial fund formed to collect and invest privatisation vouchers. It was unsuccessful in its attempts to reinvest these vouchers, and collapsed. Back in Ireland, Ganley had owned the high-profile jewellery website, Adornis.com, which collapsed after the downturn in the technology sector. A 2006 interview in CNBC’s European Business magazine suggested Ganley had a personal worth of €300 million. Declan Ganley also has investments in a joint venture with Nana Pacific called Rivada Pacific. Rivada Päcific has contracts worth $240 million with the US Military. He is Chairman of Rivada Networks and recently appointed former Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Richard Meyers to the board.

In May 2011, Ganley set up a Swiss finance fund St. Columbanus AG with businessman and academic Constantin Gurdgiev and Andrew Jamieson. Ganley makes regular TV and radio appearances in Ireland, occasionally alongside his business partner Gurdgiev. Both promote a continuation of capitalism and free market ideology and are critical of the anti-capitalism of the Occupy movement.