Quinn may want to be seen as Lear but greed is his tragedy

THE BOTTOM LINE:Bankrupt Seán Quinn has publicly tried to portray himself as a type of King Lear figure, who is more sinned against than sinning. He admits he was wrong to take cash from Quinn Insurance to cover losses on his gamble on Anglo Irish Bank but he claims the bank has perpetrated a greater wrong by robbing him and his family of their wealth and companies.

Quinn is certainly a tragic figure and his story could fit into Shakespeare’s great works: a fallen captain of industry lamenting an empire seized by moneylenders but which was in fact destroyed by his own greed; his only son imprisoned in the Republic; a nephew banished or in self-imposed exile to Northern Ireland; a brother defending him publicly; and daughters (unlike Lears) rallying to his cause.

He has for years tried to create an image as “a simple farmer’s son”, a man who told me in an interview 11 years ago that he planned to “live poor and die rich”. But this masks the real Quinn – a man who was greedy for more and more wealth and played complex, high-risk financial games to achieve it.

His affidavit to a Belfast court last year claiming unsuccessfully that he was resident in Northern Ireland to seek a more lenient life in bankruptcy pointed to the business empire that he created from the materials taken from the land around Slieve Rushen in Fermanagh.

“I was born on 3 September 1946 in a small farmhouse one mile from the Irish Border at Derrylin, Co Fermanagh, in the parish of Teemore,” he wrote.

One of four children, he said he was the fourth or possibly the fifth generation of Quinns to have lived on the farm at Derrylin.

Quinn left school at 14 to work the family farm with his father while his brother Peter went to university and became an accountant, and his two sisters trained as teachers. He considered himself a Fermanagh man “born and bred” but “more particularly I consider myself to be from the parish of Teemore”. He attended Mass in the parish church regularly.

“I own a burial plot with the grounds of the cemetery adjacent to the church. I have made a will in which I have expressed the wish that I be buried in this plot upon my death,” he said.

By the time his father died in 1967, the Quinn family farm had grown to almost 23 acres of arable land and 208 acres of low-lying land. He was “very fortunate” to discover there were “very substantial deposits of sand and gravel”. These became the very valuable source of raw materials for various companies that became the Quinn Group, he said.

Few can question Quinn’s skill in growing his manufacturing businesses through politically tempestuous times in the Border region from the early 1970s to the 1990s. The vast employment he created in an economic black spot is an astonishing testament to his doggedness as he took on the likes of Cement Roadstone Holdings in concrete and building materials, and Paul Coulson’s Ardagh in glass, no slouches in the business world.

But Quinn’s failures came when he strayed outside the areas he knew best, investing in technology stocks before the dotcom crash of 2001 and gambling self-destructively on Anglo’s shares from 2005 that have cost him dearly as a result of the crash of 2008.

Quinn also failed to understand the UK insurance market. For example, one of the joint administrators of Quinn Insurance told the High Court yesterday that the insurer sold €65 million of professional indemnity insurance over three years on policies at the wrong prices – or that should never have been sold at all – and has so far paid out or provided for €311 million in claims on this business.

During a visit last year to Quinn Group factories between Ballyconnell in Co Cavan and Derrylin in Co Fermanagh – the centre of Quinn’s empire – a manager overseeing one production line told me that entrepreneurs take gambles and if Quinn had not taken gambles he would still be tending to the family farm. Another manager questioned whether risk-taking entrepreneurs can operate in a highly regulated businesses such as insurance. One of his own loyal employees seemed to recognise that Quinn had moved outside his area of comfort and expertise.

Handing down her damning contempt-of-court judgment on Quinn, his son and nephew, even Ms Justice Elizabeth Dunne noted that “one can appreciate the ability that led to the creation of such a business empire”.

The lesson of Quinn’s tragedy is simple: stick to what you know. Regan’s comment to her sister Goneril about their father, Lear – “yet he hath ever but slenderly known himself” – could also describe Quinn’s shortcomings in ignoring this basic principle of business.