Singer, Paul (1911–85), philatelist, was born 31 July 1911 in Bratislava, Slovakia, son of Auriel Singer, financier. The family moved to Vienna in 1925 where he was educated at high school before studying French and international law in Paris. He later graduated Ph.D. from the University of Lausanne. In 1930 his family moved from Vienna to London, and on returning from Paris (1931) he studied briefly at the London School of Economics before leaving to join his father's finance firm. He remained with the firm until it was wound up in 1953 due to insolvency. Early in 1954 Singer travelled to Dublin and in February introduced himself to Jerome and Desmond Shanahan, the father-and-son proprietors of Shanahan's furniture and antique auction rooms on Corrig Avenue, Dún Laoghaire, Dublin. Singer, a flamboyant and colourful character, told the Shanahans that he had experience of dealing in the world of philately, and thus Shanahan's Stamp Auctions Ltd was formed. Singer owned half of the company with a paid up capital of £200 and soon purchased a minor collection in London, which was sold at the first sale in May 1954 for a profit.
Acutely aware of the benefits of publicity, he later launched a magazine entitled Green ISLE Philately, ostensibly a journal for the amateur philatelist; Singer used the magazine to promote his auctions by having a pamphlet with future lots and sales enclosed with each magazine. By the second issue (October 1954) he claimed to have a circulation of nearly 10,000. The magazine also contained a form for placing a postal bid at the auctions, and this proved highly successful. By May 1955 the firm was the third largest philately sales company in Britain and Ireland and Singer was known by the major dealers in New York and London. The success of the venture led to his idea to bring more money into the company through small investors and weekly auctions. Through the magazine, he promoted the offer to invest £50 for a minimum of three months with the slogan ‘Profit without risk’. The investors remained the owners of the stamps which were merely purchased on their behalf by Singer and sold in Shanahan's auction rooms. The venture was such a triumph that Singer later came up with another scheme whereby people invested £10 with a guaranteed repayment after four months. However, this differed from the previous idea in that each investor was part of a syndicate, and so it was a blind gamble.
By 1959 the company had received £2,000,000 in investments and Singer was living a lavish lifestyle that included a home on thirteen acres and a chauffeur in full livery. The gambling nature of the syndicate scheme had aroused the suspicions of the philately world and the media, and Singer used his promotional skills to reassure investors by throwing lavish parties, such as the Millionaires’ Stamp Ball, that made the gossip columns of the newspapers. In 1959 he purchased the Lombardo-Venezia collection. He also pulled off a philatelic coup when he persuaded Maurice Burrus, whose stamps were valued at nearly £2,000,000, to part with the British and Netherlands section of his collection and give Shanahan Stamp Auctions an option to purchase the remainder. Following the visit Singer returned to Ireland in triumph, and a party to celebrate the fifth anniversary of the first sale was planned for 9 May 1959.
The day of the party it emerged that the Lombardo-Venezia collection had been stolen the previous night and things began to unravel. A twenty-four-hour guard was placed outside the premises and investors began to panic. The money coming in dried up and there were increased demands for capital to be repaid. The pressure increased on Singer and on 25 May the firm went into voluntary liquidation with assets of less than £500,000, creditors totalling nearly 9,000, and debts of nearly £2,000,000. Four days later (29 May 1959) the four directors of the company – Singer, his wife Inna, Desmond Shanahan, and Jerome Shanahan – were arrested. During the preliminary hearings (September 1959) it was revealed that that there were fictitious purchasers, including a Mr Zombie, noted in the ledgers. The firm had been buying up any unsold lots with investors’ cash and registering the purchase in the ledger as a debt to the firm. Thus Singer was using money coming in from one group of investors to pay out dividends to another group. This worked as long as the money came in; but after the theft, funds dried up and the firm could not meet the surge of calls for capital to be repaid and had to close. The court also heard that between 1957 and 1959 more than £1,000,000 was transferred in several currencies to several accounts held in the name of Singer and his wife in Canada and Switzerland. Yet stamps to the same value did not come back into the country.
Singer, his wife, and Desmond Shanahan, who had authorised the payments, were sent for trial on the evidence while Jerome Shanahan was freed because he had no case to answer. Singer researched his own case while in custody and conducted his own defence in the trial, which began 17 October 1960. The trial was delayed because Singer had mounted several habeas corpus challenges to his initial incarceration before the trial. On 19 November he was convicted of nineteen charges of intent to cheat and fraud. The trial judge gave him a week before passing sentence to work with the liquidator to find the missing money. Singer continued to protest his innocence and the judge subsequently sentenced him to fifteen years’ imprisonment. Singer appealed the conviction on several grounds, including that the jury was biased because the foreman was a member of the accountancy firm that liquidated Shanahan Stamp Auctions Ltd. The conviction was quashed on 23 June 1961 and a retrial on nine of the original nineteen convictions was ordered. The second trial opened in October 1961, and on 24 January the trial ended with the prosecution failing to prove its case beyond a reasonable doubt. Following the longest criminal trial in the history of the state Singer was set free and afterwards gave a press conference at which he stated that every person would get their money back. He was never seen in Ireland again and died 23 February 1985 in Canada.
He married (date unknown) Inna Wolf, daughter of a London businessman. They had one son and one daughter and lived at Cairn Hall, Foxrock, Co. Dublin.