Show us the money Quinn tells IBRC

As the process to formally liquidate Sean Quinn’s former property portfolio begins, he says the Government should now officially declare how much IBRC has recovered on behalf of the taxpayer and how much it has spent on professional fees and other costs in pursuing the debt which, he says, in 2011 he offered to pay back four separate times.

In his 2023 book, 'In My Own Words' and two subsequent podcasts, Sean Quinn has repeatedly claimed how he offered to pay back almost €2.9bn in debts to the Anglo Irish Bank including money the bank illegally lent him to prop up its own share price.

His offers were ultimately turned down, and for the past 15 years the State has either been embattled in court cases with the Quinn family to recover the debt or spent significant amounts of money chasing their foreign assets to pay the debt.

Sean Quinn told the Celt, if his offers of repayment had been accepted and he was allowed to continue trading his business empire as he had been doing for almost 40 years, the taxpayer would’ve been fully repaid by 2018.

WIND DOWN

It is being reported this week that the government has appointed liquidators to Quinn Property Holdings which, before the 2008 crash, acquired an estimated €500M worth of property in various locations around the world including Russia, India, Turkey and Ukraine.

The property business was a subsidiary of Quinn Insurance, which was set up in 1996. Its formal liquidation draws to a close a dramatic 30-year saga.

From a quarry business on the Cavan-Fermanagh border in 1973, Sean Quinn went on to establish tarmac, rooftiles, radiators, glass and energy companies among several others. By the 1990s, Quinn was impossible to ignore as a disruptor in the insurance and health insurance markets and the Irish and global hospitality industry. Buying up commercial properties like office blocks, warehouses and shopping centres in strategically important locations was a natural progression for a conglomerate like Quinn.

However, when the global property and banking bubbles burst from 2008, it was discovered that Sean Quinn had a disastrous stake in Anglo Irish Bank and owed it €2.9bn.

Anglo was later found to have hidden financial deception from regulators including providing illegal secret loans to select clients like Sean Quinn to buy the bank's own shares and stop the price from falling and engaging in multi-billion-euro circular transactions with other financial institutions to artificially inflate its deposits on paper.

In 2009, in order to prevent complete systemic collapse, the government moved to nationalise the insolvent Anglo Irish Bank changing its name to Irish Bank Resolution Corporation (IBRC). From then on, the multi-billion debt was effectively owed to the Irish state, or its taxpayers.

In 2011, IBRC took control of the manufacturing and insurance businesses, and Sean Quinn was declared bankrupt.

In September of the same year, the family say they offered to return foreign property assets valued at approximately €500M but that was also refused. “The Irish taxpayer has paid a minimum of €5bn as a consequence of these refusals,” Sean Quinn reckons.

Since then, the state has engaged in highly complex cross-border legal battles to seize and unwind control of the Quinn family's international property portfolio.

Last month, the company set up in the North in 2012 to recover the overseas assets was dissolved and last week, the process of liquidating the Quinn Property Holdings was started.

The final payment of $9.4M from the book debt of a Quinn property company was made to IBRC in two amounts in July and December 2025.

It was estimated in 2019 that IBRC had only recovered between €800M and €1bn in property assets. It is not known how much it has cost the state in legal and other professional fees to pursue the money.

Despite a decade of liquidations and seizing global Quinn assets from Russian office blocks to domestic manufacturing plants, the debt could never be fully recovered due to massive asset depreciation.

STATEMENT OF AFFAIRS

“Is there not an onus on the Government to show a statement of facts now?” Sean Quinn asked when the Celt contacted him for comment. “After costs and depreciation what is the net figure of what the Government recovered?"

He believes the taxpayer is owed the final figures.

Mr Quinn also said that, had he been allowed to stay in charge of his companies, the Quinn Group would’ve fully repaid the debt, including the money that he says was lent to him illegally, by 2018.

“At the end of the day what needs to be remembered is that, in 2006, before the crash, we made €485M profit after tax and depreciation. We had always increased our profit by 10 per cent over every 10 years we were in business.

“We never over-estimated our profits when we borrowed from a bank. From 1973 until 2006, we always had borrowings of three times our profit, which to a shop in Fermanagh and Cavan or the Quinn Group is considered low-level borrowing by any bank.

“We would’ve been back to pre-2010 borrowings by 2015 or would’ve paid the entire amount back to IBRC, which was owned by the taxpayer, by 2018.

“Instead, the State has spent millions on litigation, sending planes across the world and professional fees and what did the taxpayer get out of it is what should be asked now.’’