The Law Closes In On The Richest Man In Ireland–The Billionaire Mighty Quinn

As former billionaires shuffle through the criminal and bankruptcy courts, the Irish public is gasping at the extremes of deceit, cronyism and hubris that pushed the country into a massive bail out from the IMF and European Central Bank – and an interminable recession under suffocating austerity measures. At the center of current attention is sixty-six year-old Sean Quinn — once dubbed the “The Mighty Quinn”– and recently deemed to be worth $6 billion, but now bankrupt and struggling to stay out of prison.

“Sean Quinn has painted himself as a kind of King Lear figure… He is certainly a tragic figure of Shakespearean proportions.”  Simon Carswell, author of Anglo Republic: Inside the Bank that Broke Ireland.

Listed by Forbes as the 164th richest man in the world in 2008, and certainly the richest in Ireland, Quinn and much of his family are being pursued in the Irish High Court for systematic, fraudulent and certainly bizarre attempts to put substantial offshore assets out of the reach of the nationalized Anglo Irish Bank to which they are massively indebted. Anglo was the Irish Lehman Brother’s – and then some. Many of its directors are themselves facing prosecution for digging into its assets on a massive scale in a giant Ponzi scheme that led to Anglo’s collapse and in some ways that of the nation’s, in machinations partly driven by a desperate attempt to stabilize the bank after Sean Quinn muscled into it. Anglo Irish Bank is now called the, cough, “Irish Bank Resolution Corporation”(IBRC) – shorthand for the Irish government trying to scrape together some returns for a house of cards whose recapitalization cost the Irish taxpayer 28 billion euros, which is in US. terms, oh, gazillions.

Sean Quinn’s ties to one of the world’s coziest banks ran deep. He was the king of the Irish nouveau riche. Originally involved with cement-making, he moved on to property development, hotels, and a hugely successful insurance business. He bought himself a 5% stake in Anglo and illegally leveraged money from his insurance business to help finance his increasingly global interests – from the UK, Bulgaria, Poland, Russia, and Australia to India – which included 95 listed holding companies. He then used an arcane, anonymous and perilous mechanism called “Contracts for Difference” (CFDs) – not shares per se– to take over 28 percent of Anglo in July 2007 – the peak of the fairy tale Irish boom. Anglo soon had its great fall rendering Quinn with 455 million euros of  immediate debt to the bank, and the Humpty Dumpty of Irish speculative madness was never to be put back together again since its collapse. When the auditors finally looked at the mess they wanted money and/or assets back, especially from Quinn. But Quinn had his insurance business closed by Ireland’s financial regulator,  Matthew Elderfield, drying up his cash flow for repayment.

The screws turned, even as Anglo itself turned into national debacle.  Yet the subsequent shenanigans of the Quinns in the auditors’ opinion were breathtaking. Swedish registered holdings were transferred to Cypress, even as he spent 100,000 euros on his daughter wedding cake. Others assets had been shifted to the British Virgin Islands. One daughter-in-law was given a 36 million euro termination of employment contract. Huge holdings in Kiev were transferred to the Quinn Properties Ukraine’s managing director there, Larissa Puga, for 500,000 euros. Substantial Russian assets, including a 180 million euro office block were transferred to a holding company in Belize run by a nephew, Peter Daragh Quinn, who had reportedly put up just 1000 euros and a lap top computer as collateral. Peter then declared himself bankrupt in Northern Ireland. An Irish High Court judge described the scheme as being one of “mesmeric complexity.”

“(Their scheme was) so undermining of the rule of law and the administration of justice that it is without parallel.” Paul Gallagher, senior counsel for IBRC.

The IBRC found the money trail to be mind boggling. Just what was the the Russian property holding company Finansstory worth? Its computers were mysteriously smashed. Its internet server somehow fried. Sean Quinn meanwhile had himself declared bankrupt also under the separate jurisdiction of Northern Irish law. The Republic of Ireland got that annulled as a blatant ruse, since The Mighty Quinn had had his 95 companies originally registered south of the border. But the Perseverent Patriarch succeeded in getting a new bankruptcy certificate issued in his homeland to the south in 2011.

Still, the IBRC kept after The Mighty Quinn and his family. The High Court determined that Sean Quinn, Jr., was guilty of sufficient subterfuge that they put him in Montjoy gaol this summer for three months for Contempt of Court. The nephew Peter’s Northern Ireland residence has so far kept him away from prosecution. The case of the Mighty Quinn himself – who claims he is being pursued in a witch-hunt — is due for the dockets in November. Sadly for Ireland, there are dozens of such cases pending, if not all on such a breath-taking scale.