Bankrupt property tycoon Derek Quinlan, who still owes Irish taxpayers €403 million through State agency Nama, received a €2.5 million tax rebate from Revenue that he immediately transferred to his wife and hid from his insolvency administrators in the UK.
The money was used to fund their “living expenses”, which included €1,200 (£1,000 stg) per month spent on alcohol and close to £100,000 (€118,000) a year in rent on a six-bedroom London house, newly obtained UK court records show.
Mr Quinlan – one of the most prolific Irish property investors of the Celtic Tiger period, who lost his fortune in the 2008-09 crash – failed to disclose the tax rebate in 2018 to his UK insolvency administrators, who cited it among seven reasons last November why they blocked Mr Quinlan’s exit from bankruptcy.
The other reasons include his insistence that he didn’t keep numerous financial records, notably for two Monaco bank accounts, and the fact that he initially “forgot” he was due to receive €317,000 from a property deal.
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Details of the transactions are revealed in a trove of documents obtained by The Irish Times in a long-running investigation into Mr Quinlan’s finances. As part of that investigation, this newspaper secured an order in the UK courts to gain access to the voluminous file on his bankruptcy.
The Irish Times was granted access to thousands of pages of financial and legal documents relating to Mr Quinlan’s affairs, including details of his assets and liabilities, memos, emails, letters, and other correspondence with investigators and advisers.
They also include correspondence with official agencies such as Nama – the National Asset Management Agency, set up by the then Fianna Fáil-led government in 2009 to buy loans from the State-guaranteed Irish banks to clean up their balance sheets.
He was Nama’s biggest debtor and once owed it €3.5 billion from his Celtic Tiger property deals.
Mr Quinlan’s joint bankruptcy trustees at London firm Begbies Traynor told the High Court in London last November he was not co-operating “in any meaningful sense”. They feared there were “other undisclosed assets which may have been transferred away by [Mr Quinlan]” in the lead up to his bankruptcy in 2022, which came after a four-year legal battle.
In a Microsoft Teams call with administrators, a High Court judge also expressed his “concern” over the €2.5 million tax rebate. It was transferred by Mr Quinlan to his wife Siobhán on the same day in 2018 that the creditor who propelled him to bankruptcy sent a payment demand to his office.
“He was a man of business in a very significant way for many years and was used to keeping detailed records,” said Jacob Beake, one of the trustees. “Yet upon his bankruptcy he claims to have nothing.”
Bankruptcy in Britain usually lasts 12 months and Mr Quinlan was due to automatically exit the process with a clean slate in November 2023. However, his trustees asked a judge to keep him bankrupt while they further investigated his byzantine financial affairs. He is currently scheduled to automatically exit insolvency in four weeks, unless the trustees seek a further delay.
Mr Quinlan told the court he was “shocked” not to be allowed exit bankruptcy and the concerns about his conduct were “baseless and unfair”. He said he had co-operated fully and provided all records. He said a “friend” had even paid for a specialist insolvency lawyer to help him co-operate properly. He also cited his poor health, including heart issues, and said he almost “died twice”.
The trustees, however, argued he was still withholding information from them, including the identity of a mystery “politically exposed person” in New York whom he has claimed helped him pay his huge legal fees as he fought against being made bankrupt. They also complained he closed one of his Monaco accounts the day after his bankruptcy order, and they cannot obtain any details of it.
In the meantime Mr Quinlan remains mired in bankruptcy. He said his only income is pension receipts of £3,038 (€3,637) per month, including the Irish State old-age pension. His wife, he said, funds the rest of their monthly outgoings of £15,185.
Mr Quinlan did not comment when asked by The Irish Times if he was confident he would exit bankruptcy next month. His trustees in bankruptcy did not give a response to questions about whether they would seek a further delay to his discharge, confirming only that November 23rd was his automatic exit date.
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