IBRC recovers $8m from former Quinn assets in Russia and Ukraine

The liquidators of IBRC have recovered $8 million since last June in relation to debt owed against Russian and Ukrainian companies and assets linked to the overseas property portfolio once owned by the family of businessman Seán Quinn.

A note on a recovery of the money was made by a Belfast-based subsidiary of IBRC in its latest set of accounts, filed with the Companies House in the UK this week. The inflows were recorded under the heading of "events since the end of the financial year" to the end of last June.

The asset recovery operation, known as QIPG Refinance Ltd, was set up in 2013 to go after a portfolio of office blocks, shopping malls and logistics warehouses – once worth €500 million – that had been used as collateral against loans from IBRC, formerly Anglo Irish Bank. The bank moved to seize the properties in 2011.

The Quinn family settled a bitter dispute with IBRC two years ago, having originally claimed that Anglo Irish Bank had illegally given them €2.35 billion in loans at the height of the financial crisis to prop up a stake in the bank before it failed. An execution of a judgment against the Quinns for €440 million was stayed on condition that they helped secure the return to IBRC of valuable assets in their international property group.

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QIPG Refinance was previously jointly owned by the IBRC and Alfa A1, a business controlled by Russian oligarch Mikhail Fridman. However, A1 exited the joint venture in 2016 after struggling to sell assets in the midst of a Russian recession at the time.

Overseas

Former overseas property assets under the control of IBRC include an Indian office park, called Q-Park, in Hyderabad, a logistics centre in Kazan and a 20-storey Moscow office block known as Kutuzoff Tower. The Covid-19 pandemic has delayed plans to sell off some of these assets.

IBRC, which also took over the assets of Irish Nationwide Building Society in 2011, was put into liquidation in 2013. The liquidators, Kieran Wallace and Eamonn Richardson of KPMG, estimated in their latest update last July that IBRC had a residual loan book of about €3.5 billion that must be wound down. They estimated that the coronavirus pandemic could delay the wind-up of the lender by a year to the end of 2022.