Quinns would fix finances and free Seán Jr ‘if we could’

By Conor Ryan

Thursday, August 16, 2012

A daughter of Seán Quinn has said if her family could rectify its finances and free her brother from prison, they would do it immediately.

However, Aoife Quinn said the family could not produce the information required by the High Court and it was not leaving Seán Quinn Jr in jail for the "sake of sitting on our hands".

"If we could purge our contempt, we would," she said, adding the family was "trying our hardest to comply with the [court ]orders handed down" and it was proving to be an "exceptionally difficult" situation.

Ms Quinn said Anglo had taken everything it could from herself, her siblings, and her parents as part of the receivership process. This included her personal bank accounts, will, tax details, and legal advice.

She accepted that the company took care of everything on behalf of family members but did not know if it had covered her own wedding expenses.

The Quinn heiress said the family had moved assets this year but only those which the Irish Bank Resolution Corporation did not have claim over. The uncontested assets were already held by IBRC, she said.

Ms Quinn said she had not been talking to her cousin, Peter Darragh Quinn, and refused to accept that he was on the run.

She said he was "sitting in his house in Fermanagh".

She was speaking on the Tonight with Vincent Browne show, during which she hit out at Financial Regulator Matthew Elderfield and the administrators of her family’s former insurance business. She said the €1.6bn hole that has emerged in the company, which the administrators have said will have to be filled by the insurance compensation fund, was disgraceful.

This money will be paid by way of a levy on motor and home insurance policies. She said this should not have been required and the regulator and the administrators were attempting to justify a flawed decision to take control of the group.

Ms Quinn said there was a danger the compensation fund would put more into the firm’s reserves than was required to meet prospective claims, but under the rules of the scheme the fund would only be entitled to claim 25% of that back.

She said if insurance customers contributed 100% of the €1.6bn estimated cost, they would "only get back 25% of too much".

Ms Quinn’s husband, Stephen Kelly, was also interviewed. He defended the business model employed by the Quinn group and said its reserves had suffered because of the cost-cutting strategy employed by the administrators, Grant Thornton.