March 29, 2024

Sean Quinn and Ireland’s Boom and Bust

IN the green borderlands of County Fermanagh, there was nothing like the Mighty Quinn.

That is what they called Sean Quinn — canny conglomerateur to his friends, wily rogue to his enemies and, until recently, the richest man in Ireland.

Even now, with times so hard in this country, his up-by-the-bootstraps story is the stuff of legend, a Celtic fairy tale for strivers and climbers. This, after all, is the farmer’s son who became a quarry man and then, with gravel and grit and yes, a bit of old-fashioned greed, became a billionaire.

Until, that is, it all came crashing down.

Mr. Quinn, 65, contends he lost nearly everything when the bottom fell out of the Irish economy. His business empire, his concrete factories, his wind farms and hotels, the helicopter and the Falcon jet — all gone. Last November, after apparently gambling away his fortune on disastrous investments, he was declared bankrupt by a court in Belfast. During the proceedings, he said he was down to his last 11,000 euros, and an aging Mercedes and 166 acres of land.

That, anyway, is what Mr. Quinn says. Here in Dublin, at the financial institution formerly known as the Anglo Irish Bank, Mr. Quinn’s skeptical bankers say his assertions are, well, blarney. They suspect that he and his family still secretly control valuable assets as varied as a shopping tower in Ukraine and real estate in Hyderabad, India’s Silicon Valley.

And so the bankers have begun a global treasure hunt. Anglo Irish, which got into so much trouble that it had to be nationalized, says that the Quinns owe it more than 2.8 billion euros, and that it will fight to recover that money for Irish taxpayers.

It is yet another remarkable turn of events in the long, painful saga of the Irish economic collapse. In many ways, Mr. Quinn personified Ireland’s boom. Now, he has come to personify its bust. Banks like Anglo Irish lent lavishly to builders and investors like Mr. Quinn. But when the real estate market finally came unglued, the banks were left with more than 70 billion euros in loans that could not, or would not, be repaid.

The Irish government was forced to rescue the financial industry, and the whole debacle eventually led to a bailout by the European Union and the International Monetary Fund. Today, Ireland’s economy is still struggling. Unemployment is over 14 percent, and home prices are down 60 percent from their peak. Resentment lingers toward reckless lenders and borrowers.

One thing is sure: the Quinn story is full of surprises. Every effort to claim and manage the assets that he used as collateral for his loans from Anglo Irish has run into mysterious — and sometimes violent — difficulties. Last April, shortly after the bank tried to seize the Quinn Group, his holding company, an earthmover smashed through posts outside the company’s headquarters in Derrylin, Northern Ireland, where the Quinn family has kept a farm for five generations. A few months later, a firebomb destroyed a BMW that belonged to the new chief executive of the Quinn Group appointed by the bank. In December, a truck rammed through the company’s canteen.

No one knows who was behind most of the vandalism, and Mr. Quinn and his family have condemned the violence. In court filings, he said he passed his former headquarters nearly every day and still feels pangs of loss. “I no longer own or control the businesses which I have spent my life building up,” he said.

Such assurances aside, his former bankers suspect that Mr. Quinn has masterminded various maneuvers to hang on to at least part of his fortune. They say he has used offshore companies to thwart their efforts to gain control of his empire’s foreign holdings — a contention that the Quinns have denied.

“It is very much a three-dimensional chess game,” said Richard Woodhouse, a British accountant who is leading the quest by the Irish Bank Resolution Corporation, formerly Anglo Irish, to find and seize the Quinn Group’s international properties.

While Mr. Quinn is pleading poverty, his wife, Patricia, and his five adult children are battling the bank in court. They say they don’t owe the Irish Bank Resolution Corporation anything, since they didn’t know what they were doing when they signed the paperwork for Mr. Quinn’s loans.

Neither side agrees on much — not even who said what to whom. When his bankers told Mr. Quinn last April that they were seizing control of his conglomerate, Mr. Quinn said he would fight like a cornered rat, according to the bankers.

One of Mr. Quinn’s daughters, Aoife Quinn, remembers a more poetic declaration: “Put a dog into a corner, and it will come out barking.”

Mr. Quinn, who rarely grants interviews, declined to comment.

Article source: http://feeds.nytimes.com/click.phdo?i=b590e7e4049b57f71d4401f7e325b62d