Timing of complex arrangement regarding assets crucial to case Public Affairs Correspondent

BACKGROUND:ON THE same day Anglo Irish Bank seized the Quinn Group's shares – April 14th, 2011 – it also demanded repayment by Quinn Finance of $242 million the company owed, and against which the bank had a range of securities, including share pledges against companies in Europe that held valuable properties there.

Accountant Peter Quinn, a nephew of Seán Quinn, was the manager of these properties. All through 2010, he sought to persuade his uncle that the bank would eventually try to seize everything the Quinn family owned. However, Seán Quinn, he said, was focused at that stage on working his way through his difficulties in partnership with the bank and didn’t want to hear of his nephew’s plan to take steps to secure some family assets.

Peter Quinn said he discussed his views with some of Quinn’s adult children. How much he told them of his concerns, he couldn’t say yesterday, as the meeting usually took place over a few drinks.

By early April 2011, according to Peter Quinn, his uncle had come around to his point of view and two men were party to signing a whole raft of documents, most of them in Russian, that had the effect of assigning onwards the right of a Co Fermanagh company called Demesne Investments to more than $200 million. Much of the debt was assigned to a Ukrainian man they had never met.

The money was owed to Demesne by a number of foreign property-owning companies, including companies in Russia and the Ukraine against which Anglo had share pledges and against whose properties Anglo had mortgages.

Although there was a clear risk they might never get anything back, this was nevertheless better than the sure risk the family faced last April of losing everything to Anglo.

The Quinns are disputing their debt to Anglo and, if they win their case, the bank’s guarantees will lose their relevance. The Quinn family will again become the owners of their foreign property companies but their value will have been severely depleted because of the agreement with the Ukrainian man whom, as counsel for IBRC Paul Gallagher put it, may well run off with all the money.

What would have made more sense, Gallagher said, would have been if the Quinns had assigned the debts to companies over which they could continue to assert control. This brought matters back to a central contention being made by IBRC.

It claims the debts due to Demesne were, in fact, assigned to offshore companies that are under the control of the Quinns. However, the bank has discovered that one of the companies, Galfis Overseas Ltd, of Belize, was just a shelf company up to July of last year.

It couldn’t therefore have been party to any assignment prior to July, the bank argues. This means the assignments occurred after an order had been made in June by Mr Justice Frank Clarke forbidding any such moves.

The defendants say no assignments were made to Galfis and that documents indicating that are forgeries. The assignments purporting to have been made to Galfis were made to Gurnyak, in early April, before Mr Justice Clarke’s order.

When it was put to Peter Quinn yesterday that this wasn’t disclosed to Mr Justice Clarke last year when the family were resisting Anglo’s applications for injunctions against the family, Peter Quinn agreed. A “deliberate decision” was made not to tell the High Court, he said.