As he neared bankruptcy, the balance on former property tycoon Derek Quinlan’s Barclays bank account saw another hefty lodgement appear each time his balance approached zero. He was burning through cash.
The lodgements to the UK account started in May 2021 and ran until April 2022. Quinlan was insolvent at the time, broke, but not yet officially bankrupt – that wouldn’t happen until November 2022. Yet in the long run-up to it, he was spending heavily, according to documents filed for of his case in London.
The Irish Times gained access to Quinlan’s bulging bankruptcy file and its trove of documents on foot of a recent court order.
The cash transfers came from Quinlan Group, a company controlled by his wife, Siobhán Quinlan, a solicitor. On May 4th, 2021, her company sent £25,000 (€30,000) to Quinlan, who over many years as a high-profile Celtic Tiger property investor had acquired a reputation for enjoying life’s little luxuries.
Six days later, on May 10th, his wife’s company gave him a further £18,000. Three days after that, he received a further £1,500 and, barely a week later, another £6,000. In all, Quinlan received cash transfers of more than £50,000 from his wife’s company that month.
The following month he got £25,000, and the same again in July and in August. He received £27,000 at the start of September and another £25,000 four weeks later. The scale of the cash lodgements eased off over the following months, yet Quinlan was still receiving large regular cash transfers in lumps of between £3,000 and £21,000 every few weeks.
It is just absolutely disgusting. They’re literally just trying to scare her into paying the fees
In all, £226,000 was paid into his personal bank account from the bank account of his wife’s company over a period of 11 months, at a time when his ultimately futile legal battle to avoid bankruptcy over a property debt of €120 million was at its height.
Most of his legal bills had been covered separately, he suggested, by a mystery “politically-connected friend” in New York. Nor was the cash being used to pay for the rent on their luxury home in Monaco. That monthly rent was paid separately by his wife, who Quinlan has said also paid all their living expenses beyond Quinlan’s £3,000 monthly pension.
“She kept us alive,” said Quinlan.
Yet still he spent heavily. In late 2023, about 11 months after he entered bankruptcy, his trustees in bankruptcy called him to a meeting and, among other issues, asked him to explain the lodgements of £226,000 that they had spotted on his old bank statements.
“I don’t know,” replied Quinlan. “That may be accurate, I haven’t . . .”
“I’ve got a schedule,” said Jacob Beake, a Begbies Traynor accountant and insolvency practitioner who was one of the three trustees scrutinising Quinlan’s affairs on behalf of the official receiver. “I just wanted to understand what work you were doing for them [the cash injections] during the time to generate these fees.”
“But they weren’t fees to me,” said Quinlan, seemingly unsure of why he had been paid the equivalent of more than a quarter of a million euro into his private bank account. “I’ll have to question . . . I’ll have to check this.”
Two weeks later, Quinlan’s then lawyer, Chris Keane, wrote to Beake with an explanation. The payments, he said, were “contributions towards fees and living expenses from Siobhán Quinlan to Derek. [They] were properly recorded in Siobhan’s loan account with Quinlan Group Limited.”
Despite effectively going bust in 2009, Quinlan clearly kept up his expensive lifestyle. During 2010 and 2011, he had found himself in the middle of a tussle for control of the Maybourne hotel group, in which he held shares that were critical to the company’s future.
On one side of the battle was Irish developer Paddy McKillen snr allied with the royal family of Qatar; on the other were the Barclay twins, who owned the Daily Telegraph newspaper.
As part of a strategy to keep Quinlan and his critical shares onside, the Barclays funded his lifestyle. They gave him €500,000 in November 2010. Quinlan said it went on “living expenses”. The following year, they gave him almost £1.9 million and another lump of €500,000. Again, these sums were spent on “personal expenses”.
By 2018, the cost of Quinlan’s lifestyle had caught the attention of the National Asset Management Agency (Nama), which had refused to give him a debt write-off to allow him to exit the agency. In February of that year, Nama wrote to Quinlan’s lawyers about a number of issues, including his life in Monaco.
“Similar apartments in the block in Monaco in which your client and his spouse reside, rent for in the region of €30,000 per month,” wrote Nama’s Frank Lynch, an asset recovery manager.
Nama’s executive brought its concerns about the cost of the house in Monaco to the board of directors of the agency. It said it could not consider an exit deal for him unless “Nama is satisfied with [Quinlan’s] ability to fund the accommodation in which he is currently residing”. Later in 2018, Quinlan sent a €2.5 million tax rebate he got from Revenue to his wife to help fund their lifestyle.
While his wife kept covering their costs after they left Monaco and moved to London, Quinlan also continued to source cash. In the summer of 2022, he advised a “wealthy Norwegian family” on a property deal in France. The Norwegians used a company, Ultima Management, which matches a company linked to oil and gas investor Erik Brodahl. Quinlan was paid about £120,000 for his advice.
By the time Quinlan formally entered bankruptcy in November 2022, the scale of his cash spending had been reined in, documents suggest. Together with his wife and his three adult children, his household’s monthly outgoings by then were listed at just over £15,000, including rent.
Beake said chasing up all of Quinlan’s advisers, which have included his cousin, solicitor Michael Quinlan, and other firms, had delayed its investigation into Derek Quinlan’s affairs by ‘nine months’
Quinlan was by this stage, according to his bankruptcy documents, spending £50 per month on newspapers, £3,500 on food shopping, £1,000 on alcohol, £200 on hairdressing, £300 on Uber taxis, £151 per month on phone and internet charges and £230 per month on public transport costs.
Quinlan’s monthly outgoings in bankruptcy also included £240 per month on prescription charges and £1,000 on doctors fees, in addition to £385 per month on a BUPA health insurance premium.
The former property tycoon has suffered significant health issues, to which he has repeatedly referred in his pleadings to the bankruptcy division of the High Court in London. When he asked the court to make him bankrupt in November 2022, effectively throwing in the towel after a four-year legal battle with one of his creditors, Quinlan said his poor health had contributed towards the decision.
He said he had “suffered two instances of heart failure in the last seven months”, the most recent at that time coming in October 2022.
“I also suffer from chronic kidney disease, type 2 diabetes, and hypertension,” Quinlan told the court. “I was discharged from St Thomas’s Hospital on October 17th, 2022, where I was under the care of the heart failure team and I have been advised to rest, recuperate and avoid stress. Clearly the stress and anxiety caused by [his bankruptcy legal battle] is not assisting my recovery.”
He once again drew attention to his health issues in recorded conversations with his trustees in bankruptcy in October 2023. Yet at times during his bankruptcy battles, Quinlan has also been criticised for the way in which he had used his poor health as a reason to delay proceedings.
In December 2023, Beake reminded the bankruptcy court that in 2021 when he was fighting to stay out of bankruptcy, Quinlan had “claimed to be ill to delay procedural issues” and get an adjournment in the case. He said Quinlan had given “untruthful medical evidence”.
Beake referred to an interim judgment by Judge Anthony Mann from 2022 in which the court recalled the earlier adjournment.
“Quinlan at the time was said to be seriously ill and to have been admitted to intensive care in Monaco,” the judge wrote. “It turns out that, when the medical evidence was produced, medical evidence which I record Mr Quinlan’s solicitors resisted producing, that was simply not true.
The judge wrote that “Mr Quinlan had some health difficulties but they did not involve his being in intensive care and they did not seem to have involved his sustaining heart failure at the time, according to his own medical evidence. It would appear, therefore, that the adjournment was procured on the footing of inaccurate, if not untruthful, medical evidence”.
Quinlan refused to speak to The Irish Times when it contacted him about the evidence in his bankruptcy claim.
I have been advised to rest, recuperate and avoid stress. Clearly the stress and anxiety caused by [his bankruptcy legal battle] is not assisting my recovery
Another feature of his insolvency case has been the focus on the breadth of personal professional advisers he hired while in his pomp, and also while fighting insolvency and as a bankrupt. In his questionnaire for bankruptcy officials, Quinlan declared just one set of professional advisers – Clarke Wilmott solicitors. He wrote “No” to another question asking about his use of any other advisers.
“Contrary to the bankrupt’s questionnaire responses, he has had many advisers,” Beake complained to the court. “We have recovered documents from third parties including creditors, advisers, law firms, accountants, banks and others. We have had to contact a significant number of his advisers based on information identified in court records, online research and from information provided by creditors.”
Beake said chasing up all of Quinlan’s advisers, which have included his cousin, solicitor Michael Quinlan, and other firms, had delayed its investigation into Derek Quinlan’s affairs by “nine months”.
His use of various advisers at one stage looped back to the issue of his lack of cash, and the extent to which his wife Siobhán Quinlan was covering his expenditure.
Early in his bankruptcy battle, Quinlan was represented by solicitors from London firm Cooke, Young & Keidan (CY&K), who later came off record as his legal representatives and are listed as a creditor in his bankruptcy documents with an unpaid debt of £1.12 million.
Chris Keane, then of Wilmotts, told Quinlan’s bankruptcy trustees in October 2023 of a “disgusting” row between CY&K and Siobhán Quinlan over the payment of her husband’s legal fees. Keane said the firm wrote to her with a demand for “£1.25 million”, saying she had agreed to cover it, but that they “couldn’t produce” any emails to back this up.
“If it wasn’t privileged, I’d send you the letter,” Keane told the bankruptcy trustee Beake. “It’s absolutely disgusting . . . it’s just effectively a bully-boy tactic, so much so that I am considering making a formal complaint.”
Keane said he had reviewed “every single email that’s passed between Siobhán [Quinlan] and the firm”. He said there was nothing to back up CY&K’s assertions about her agreeing to pay the fees.
Similar apartments in the block in Monaco in which your client and his spouse reside rent for in the region of €30,000 per month
“It is just absolutely disgusting. They’re literally just trying to scare her into paying the fees. And obviously she is in a position to pay the fees, but – do you know what I mean? ... It’s just disgusting behaviour.”
Keane later left Clarke Wilmott in January of this year and joined another firm. When he was contacted about the bankruptcy last week by The Irish Times, he said he no longer represented Derek Quinlan and ceased doing so “months ago”.
Keane criticised media coverage of Quinlan’s bankruptcy affairs and said: “It doesn’t really matter what the truth is, does it? Because that’s not what gets printed.”
He said he didn’t know who Quinlan’s latest legal advisers might be, and advised to contact the businessman directly. The Irish Times, again, approached Quinlan and asked him who was representing him and if he would put the newspaper in touch with his advisers, but he gave no reply.
Currently, Quinlan is due to automatically exit bankruptcy on November 23rd. His bankruptcy trustees, who asked a judge last November to keep him in insolvency for another year, didn’t respond directly when asked if they would seek a further delay to his discharge next month.
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