Seán Quinn trying to ‘rewrite history’ with ‘fairy tale’, says former Anglo CEO

Recent claims by former billionaire Seán Quinn have been rejected as “nonsense” by the man who led Anglo Irish Bank when it seized the Quinn Group in 2011.

Mike Aynsley said Mr Quinn’s “attempt to rewrite history seems quite Trumpian”.

“He paints a picture of himself as a victim and then tells the same fairy tale, time and time again, in the hope that people will eventually believe it to be true,” he said.

Anglo seized the Quinn Group in April 2011 because it was owed a debt of €2.88 billion, which had its origins in highly risky investments Mr Quinn made in Anglo shares by way of contracts for difference (CfDs).

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Mr Quinn gave a series of interviews last week to mark the publication of his book, Seán Quinn, In My Own Words, in which he says the seizure of his business empire, and his family’s international property portfolio, was based on a “fraud”.

He admits that he and his family tried to frustrate the bank’s attempts to takeover the international property portfolio, worth hundreds of millions, but says they only did this because the property “was taken from us illegally”.

“Any of the assets in the Quinn Group, like the hotels or pubs or glass factories or cement factories, we never tried to touch any of those assets,” Mr Quinn told Newstalk. “We only touched assets [the international property portfolio] that were taken from us illegally.”

In a statement to The Irish Times, Mr Aynsley, who now lives in Australia, said Mr Quinn was made a bankrupt in January 2012 arising from debts of €2.3 billion. He said Mr Quinn signed a document that was both a guarantee and an indemnity for the debt.

“This meant that even if the loan wasn’t fully enforceable under the guarantee (which it was) then the indemnity kicked in. Justice Peter Kelly agreed and bankrupted Quinn,” Mr Aynsley said.

Other members of the Quinn family had signed similar documents.

Due to the value of the Quinn Group companies not covering all of the outstanding debt, Mr Aynsley said the bank was entitled to seek to secure the international property portfolio owned by the family.

He said no court had ever suggested the loans advanced to Mr Quinn were illegal and that the businessman continued to invest in Anglo shares after he was told to stop by former Anglo chief executive David Drumm and its former chairman, the late Seán FitzPatrick.

“Quinn then pursued other questionable sources to increase and fund further CfD positions” in the bank’s shares, Mr Aynsley said.

On Mr Quinn’s distinction between the Quinn Group and the family’s international property portfolio, and his view that the family only conspired to protect “assets that were taken from us illegally”, Mr Aynsley said this was “pure nonsense”.

“There was nothing the family could do about the Quinn Group companies once the bank had taken control, so Quinn and other family members embarked on a scheme to put the foreign property assets beyond the reach of the bank.”

He said that Anglo was not the only creditor owed money by the Quinn Group. “Bondholders were owed a further €1.25 billion and this group was also involved in the overall debt recovery process.”

On the day before the seizure of the Quinn Group in April 2011, Mr Aynsley had a meeting with Mr Quinn where the businessman argued unsuccessfully that he would be able to repay the Anglo debt.

Mr Aynsley said the solution Mr Quinn proposed for clearing his debt was “similar to those proposed by a number of the bank’s other overleveraged clients, seeking more time and relying on magical thinking that the market would return valuations to pre-crash levels imminently”.

He added: “The fact is that it wasn’t just that Quinn’s ability to service debt was gone, it was that the Group couldn’t service debt at a time when valuations of assets had collapsed (along with asset values generally) AND the markets he was servicing had also collapsed.

“He was not viable. Quinn’s CfD gambling on share prices only made a highly leveraged operational risk substantially worse.”

The actions the bank took in relation to Mr Quinn were consistent with those used in other cases where co-operation was poor, distress was evident, and where the risk to the bank of delay was likely further losses, Mr Aynsley said.

Mr Aynsley was chief executive of Anglo Irish Bank and later the State-owned Irish Bank Resolution Corporation (IBRC) into which Anglo and Irish Nationwide were subsumed, from September 2009 to February 2013.

Mr Quinn was jailed for nine weeks for contempt in late 2012 because of his and his family’s admitted effort to frustrate the IBRC’s attempt to seize the family’s international property portfolio. The bank took High Court civil “conspiracy” proceedings. Mr Quinn’s son, Seán Quinn junior, was also jailed for contempt. Mr Quinn’s cousin Peter Quinn, son of former GAA president Peter Quinn, was sentenced for contempt but fled to Northern Ireland.

The conspiracy proceedings were settled in 2019, when the five adult children of Mr Quinn consented to judgments against them of €88 million each, but the execution of the judgments was stayed on condition they took steps to help secure the return of the assets associated with the international property portfolio.

As part of the proceedings, the children wanted to claim they were put under undue influence by their father to sign the guarantees supporting Anglo loans. The settlement also involved the Quinns dropping a claim they had taken against the IBRC in which they were disputing the legality of the Anglo loans.