Businessman says case is a 'sham' created by Anglo executives

ANALYSIS:AN IMPASSIONED case for the defence was made outside Belfast High Court yesterday by Seán Quinn himself.

In his heyday Quinn was famously shy of the media but more recently he is becoming a dab hand at media interviews.

Reporters gathered around him as he exited the court, newly free from his bankruptcy status. He did not spent much time responding to questions about how he felt about losing his case. Instead he gave what seemed to be a convincing picture of how the collapse of his business empire looked from his perspective.

The whole bankruptcy issue was “only a sham”, created by the (mostly foreign) top executives of Anglo, as well as a few outsiders who were now involved in the running of the Quinn Group, he said.

Their objective was to deflect attention away from the disaster that was the destruction of the Seán Quinn Group.

“They have absolutely destroyed it. It’s wrecked. It’s disgraceful.”

His estimate was that something close to €4 billion in lost potential earnings would have arisen by the end of 2012, and another €4 billion by the end of 2017.

The problem, he said, was that the government and Anglo (he never calls it the Irish Bank Resolution Corporation) were spending “tens of millions on public relations”. They have some people on it full time “saying look at this, this was wrong, Seán Quinn’s a rogue, he’s a thief, he did this, that and the other wrong’, and all they are trying to do is deflect [attention] from what the real disaster is”.

He wanted to bring attention back towards the main issue, he said. “Now everyone around here today is going to go away and say, ‘sure that fool Quinn, he was talking off the top of his head, he didn’t know what was he was talking about, he’s a bankrupt, what was he raving on about’?”

But he wanted to meet journalists, in a structured way, and go through the figures with them over the coming weeks, to show where the billions were being lost. “What do you call him, James Morrissey, is our PR man in Dublin,” he said, and he invited journalists to contact Morrissey and set up the meetings.

It did not appear to strike Quinn (he mostly refers to himself in the third person) that there was something odd about a man who had told the courts in November that he had assets of £50,000 proposing that meetings be set up through a PR executive.

Will Anglo get any of its money back, he was asked? “Not at all. How would they get it back. Sure, they have the company [the Quinn Group] destroyed.”

But wasn’t he blaming everyone else for the consequences of his gamble on Anglo shares?

“Was I stupid and did I spend too much money on that? I spent seven hundred odd million pounds on contracts for difference.

“After that Anglo Irish Bank put in all the money, I didn’t put in the money. It was at their request. They didn’t want those shares sold – €2.3 billion of our money was lent against supporting the shares, not buying the shares. I want that made very clear.”

However he didn’t want to talk further about it, as it is to be the subject of yet more legal proceedings in Dublin later this year.

Lots of legal proceedings, but towards what end?