Mighty fall of a Border billionaire

For most of his life the media was kept well away from Seán Quinn, but that has changed now. A key moment came in December 2011, when he appeared at the High Court in Northern Ireland after Irish Bank Resolution Corporation, into which Anglo Irish Bank had been subsumed, challenged Quinn's being made a bankrupt there rather than in the Republic. Characteristics that stood out then are the stand-out features of the tale told in Citizen Quinn by the business reporters Gavin Daly and Ian Kehoe.

There is a self-obsession about Quinn that pervades everything. It is probably both a product and a cause of his success. It may also explain why his career has ended in such epic failure. One of the issues that emerged during the Belfast hearings, for example, was that personal Quinn family bills were sent to the Quinn Group headquarters for payment from company money. On a different scale entirely, one of the core reasons why his business empire collapsed was that he used company assets, including assets belonging to Quinn Insurance, when his investment in – "bet on" is a better phrase – Anglo Irish Bank shares went so horrendously wrong.

It appears Quinn had a difficulty accepting that boundaries existed between him and the businesses he established. This may explain how, at the Belfast hearing, he could tell the court that he decided to invest in Anglo and so decided to establish a company in Madeira belonging to his (adult) children through which he would make and manage these investments.

This odd self-focus presumably also lies behind his tendency to refer to himself in the third person. It contributes to the sense of tragedy that pervades this book, in that Quinn’s drive and, as he himself has said, his insatiable greed for money are the explanations for his rise to enormous wealth and his spectacular fall.

Another trait, a kind of siege mentality and a tendency to blame others, became apparent outside the Belfast court when the businessman began to rail against the people who had put Quinn Insurance into administration and appointed share receivers to the Quinn Group. They were English people, Scots, Australians, foreigners who had flown into Ireland to pillage all he had created and who would be gone as soon as they had taken what they could. “You people,” he said, referring to the assembled reporters, “are being led by the nose.”

Good years
This book deals quickly and briskly with the good years. Born on his father's nine-hectare farm in Derrylin, Co Fermanagh, which he inherited, Quinn left school at 14 and did not take to being a struggling farmer. He was 27, married and captain of the Fermanagh GAA football team when he started extracting and selling the sand and gravel that lay under his poor fields.

Almost 10 years later, in 1982, he started manufacturing roof tiles; two years after that he began making prestressed concrete blocks. All of this on the Derrylin land. Three years later he moved into cement. He started to play the stock market and to invest in property. In the 1990s he moved into energy production, with wind turbines behind his Derrylin headquarters, then he moved into radiator and bottle manufacturing, all the while continuing to buy property and invest in stocks and shares. This huge commercial success happened at a time when the Border was witnessing murder and sectarian hatred.

The decision to get involved in insurance in the mid 1990s was a big mistake. As part of the “low cost” approach, Quinn believed Quinn Direct should try to pay as little as possible to claimants, rather than the appropriate amounts under the policies that customers had bought. This showed a fundamental misunderstanding of the idea of insurance.

But Quinn loved to see the money rolling in, and if those who took over after Quinn Insurance was put into administration are correct, his thirst for profit meant he didn’t put enough money aside to pay for the claims that would inevitably arrive.

The day of reckoning has now come, and every holder of a home-, motor- or commercial-insurance policy in Ireland is being levied to replace the €1.6 billion that has had to be paid from the Insurance Compensation Fund to deal with the mess.

There is a lovely image in the book of Quinn retiring to his office after Sunday dinner to review the claims being processed by the insurance business, presumably with a view to saving as much as possible.

This disinclination to pay out lived alongside an irrepressible fascination with risk. In 2005 he started using contracts for difference, or CFDs, for his share dealings. With CFDs, instead of buying shares the investor has to put up only a small percentage of their value. If the share price rises, the return is multiples of what it would be had the investor bought the shares themselves. But if you lose, you lose big.

At first Quinn took out contracts on a range of shares, Irish and international, but in 2006 he began focusing on Anglo. His paper returns were huge. So he did something that is hard to understand: he sold his other shares to concentrate on Anglo. He bet all he had on one horse, using a high-risk method. It was a crazy thing to do. Quinn had lost the plot.

When Anglo’s share price started to fall, Quinn had to pay hundreds of millions of euro so that his CFD margins were kept at the agreed level. The bank issued more than €2 billion to fund a strategy to deal with the existential threat the investment posed, and Quinn’s children signed associated guarantees.

Billion-euro debts
Eventually he lost everything, and his children, each of whom he planned to leave a billionaire, have instead ended up with billion-euro debts that they are challenging through the courts.

About 10 years ago Quinn decided he would spend €1 billion a year for five years on a foreign property portfolio that he would leave to his five children. A worryingly devious attempt to save this portfolio has seen him and his son Seán jnr go to jail for contempt, and a warrant has been issued for the arrest of his nephew Peter Darragh Quinn. How this scandal will play out now IBRC has been put into liquidation is an issue to be watched with interest.

The bulk of this gripping and well-researched book is about the fall rather than the rise of Citizen Quinn. It paints a picture of a man who is delusional about what has happened and the extent to which he is to blame.

You would have to be hard-hearted not to feel pity. As he said in Belfast, he can see the Quinn Group headquarters from his home. Since the group was seized by its creditors, on April 14th, 2011, he has been barred from the premises. Almost every day he drives past what was once his father’s farm. But he’s no longer allowed to set foot on it.

Citizen Quinn: A Man, an Empire and a Family, by Gavin Daly and Ian Kehoe, is published by Penguin Ireland, priced £14.99

Colm Keena is an Irish Times journalist. His novel, Bishop's Move, has just been published by Somerville Press