John Finnegan, the ex-auctioneer and friend of the former taoiseach Charles Haughey, has left an estate worth €68.5m to his family and a one-time personal assistant.

Finnegan, who died in 2006, was involved in some of the country’s most controversial land deals.

The tycoon, nicknamed “the Dancer”, sourced the infamous Johnston, Mooney & O’Brien site in Ballsbridge for Telecom Eireann in the early 1990s. It later emerged that the company acquired the site for twice its value of the previous year.

A decade ago Finnegan was unmasked as a customer of Ansbacher Cayman, the wealth management company involved in a scheme to run a sham bank that helped the rich and powerful to evade tax in the 1980s and 1990s.

Finnegan bequeathed 90% of his shareholding in Finnegan Menton, the property consultancy firm that he had built up with his father, to Iain Finnegan, his son and the current managing director.

The remaining 10% was left to Sandra O’Neil, his personal secretary, who gave evidence to the Flood tribunal in 2001 in relation to shredded documents belonging to her boss.

He also appeared before the planning inquiry after it emerged that Foxtown, his Jersey-based company, had paid £10,000 (€11,094) of the £60,000 corrupt payment made to disgraced minister Ray Burke in 1984.

Finnegan stipulated in his will, written in 1999, that after his debts and funeral costs had been paid and the shares distributed, the remainder should be left to his wife Aline.

He was friends with several businessmen, including Dermot Desmond, Robert “Pino” Harris and Michael Smurfit, who was Telecom chairman at the time of the Johnston, Mooney & O’Brien row and subsequently resigned over it.

Finnegan also negotiated the largest office-letting deal in the state between Eircell and the developers of the Central Park complex in Sandyford, Co Dublin. The deal, done in 2000, resulted in the phone operator paying IR£5.25m (€6.67m) annually in rent.

The Revenue Commissioners deferred inheritance tax on the will. A court order said that a limited grant of probate was issued on January 3, 2007.

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