SEÁN QUINN’S five children shared a €200 million payout from the main Quinn Group holding company last year. The group also made a provision for a €126 million write-off of money forwarded to the family by the group and lost in its disastrous investment in the now nationalised Anglo Irish Bank.
This figure brings the total write-off over the past two years to €888 million.
The Quinn family and its businesses are understood to be the largest single customer of Anglo Irish Bank.
Accounts for the Quinn holding company, Quinn Group (ROI) Ltd, filed recently in Belfast, show it made a pre-tax profit of €83 million in 2008, compared with a loss of €425 million the previous year, when it wrote off loans to the family totalling €762 million.
Leaving aside these exceptional items, the group made a pre-tax profit of €466 million last year, and €530 million in 2007.
The group is one of the largest Irish-owned businesses in the State with interests in insurance, glass, cement and the leisure sector.
The €200 million payment to Quinn family members was made in the course of 2008 and was taken from shareholders’ funds at the company. Mr Quinn’s five children – Colette, Seán Jr, Ciara, Aoife and Brenda – each own one fifth of Quinn Group, which controls the bulk of the family’s business interests.
A spokesman for the company said the payment was made “to facilitate the development of their independent wealth portfolios”.
Mr Quinn’s family holds substantial personal interests outside the group, notably in property. Each of the children, the eldest of whom is 34, owns specific assets in their own right.
Four of the five children work within the group.
The accounts for Quinn Group (ROI) show sales rose a shade to €2.3 billion last year, while profits before tax and exceptional expenses related to Anglo and other items, dropped by 12 per cent from €530 million to €466 million, mainly on the back of margin pressures in insurance.
The company indicated on Friday that it was on track to at least maintain profits around this level this year.
In a statement accompanying the numbers, Mr Quinn, chairman of the group, described 2008 as “one of the toughest years I have experienced during 35 years in business”.
He said that he was nonetheless “encouraged” by the group’s performance, notably the €83 million pretax profit it generated.
The Fermanagh businessman secretly built up a one-quarter stake in Anglo over a period in the run-up to summer of 2008, just as the bank was beginning to fail amid international turmoil in the financial markets.
The holding was accumulated by way of contracts-for-difference (CFDs), special structures that allow investors to bet on shares rising as well as falling and which do not require them to pay for the entirety of the stock up-front.
Mr Quinn subsequently unwound this CFD position, drawing on Anglo funding while converting part of it into a straightforward 15 per cent shareholding in the bank.
The remaining 10 per cent was controversially sold to 10 long-standing Anglo clients in an effort to avoid a collapse in the bank’s shares.
The matter has been under investigation by the Financial Regulator and the Office of the Director of Corporate Enforcement, amid reports that Mr Quinn’s total loan exposure to Anglo could run into the billions.
On Friday, a spokesman for the group said the family has, over 36 years, always repaid its borrowings and “will continue to do so”.
In his chairman’s statement with the accounts Mr Quinn said “the family’s property portfolio outside of the group continues to progress well and some of these investments will rank amongst the best we have ever made, and will go a long way towards recovering the very substantial losses incurred in the stock market over the past few years”.