Quinn trust set to repay donors’ cash
Fund to help pay legal fees to be wound down
A TRUST set up to help Sean Quinn pay his legal fees is to be wound down with the intention of repaying the donors who contributed tens of thousands to the fund.
The Erne Group Trust paid more than €1.7m which had been loaned by 35 people to help defray the massive legal costs incurred by the former tycoon and his family.
The identity of the donors is confidential but the amounts contributed emerged in a later High Court case. They included sums of €400,000, €300,000 and sums of between €125,000 and €150,000, contributed by 16 people. A married couple contributed €115,000 and £25,000.
An informed source told the Sunday Independent that while some donors are said to have been repaid, six have not and the intention is to repay them and close the trust. It is not clear how much if any funds are still held by the trust or how much remains.
The Erne Group Trust was set up after Sean Quinn, formerly Ireland’s richest man, lost control of his businesses to the former Anglo-Irish Bank in 2011 and his family became embroiled in massive legal action that finally settled out of court earlier this year.
Although founded by sympathetic business people to help the former billionaire and his family to pay their legal bills, the relationship between some trustees and Sean Quinn has since soured.
John Bosco O’Hagan, a Northern Irish businessman who helped set up the trust and became its chairman, recently told the Irish News that it troubled him that some people who loaned money to the trust had still not been repaid.
The same article quoted sources close to the Quinn family who said 29 donors had been paid back directly and the family was committed to repaying all donations.
However Mr O’Hagan told the newspaper that none of that money had been repaid through the Erne Trust through which it was borrowed. Mr O’Hagan, who is not on speaking terms with Mr Quinn, told the Irish News that he himself had put in £50,000 of his own money.
The informed source told the Sunday Independent that as a result of donors being paid off directly and not through the trust, it had no record of the debt being settled which raised complications for the trust.
Loans should have been repaid through the Erne Group trust and with the knowledge of the trust.
Detectives are currently investigating the history of the attacks on the Quinn companies that culminated in the abduction and assault of Kevin Lunney, chief operating officer of Quinn Industrial Holdings.
The trust came under scrutiny from a receiver appointed by the Irish Bank Resolution Corporation (IBRC) — the State-owned entity that replaced Anglo Irish Bank.
The identity of the donors is confidential, but their names and amounts contributed were disclosed to a receiver appointed by the IBRC to track down the Quinn family assets.
During the course of a High Court action in Belfast, lawyers for the receiver alleged that some of the money paid into the trust actually came from Sean Quinn and was “washed” through donors who contributed to the trust. “If it were Quinn assets washed through donors’ hands and back into the benefit of the Quinns, that’s the mischief,” the lawyer for the receiver told the High Court.
Lawyers for the trustees denied the allegations. The High Court rejected the receiver’s application as a “fishing expedition”.
The High Court ruled that the donations into a trust did not come out of Sean Quinn’s family’s assets and rejected the receiver’s application. The funds in the Erne Group Trust were “kept out of the hands of the Quinns who could not call for them to be paid over to them”.