Quinns say IBRC is being ‘led on a wild goose chase’
THE family of bankrupt former billionaire Sean Quinn have denied court allegations that they may be hiding up to €500m in undisclosed assets.
In a statement released to the media the Quinn family labelled the allegations, made in the High Court on Friday as ‘scurrilous lies’.
The special liquidator of the former Anglo Irish Bank said it had struck a deal with ‘informants’ who claim to have information about ‘substantial assets’ not disclosed by members of the Quinn family including an alleged substantial investment in gold, the Commercial Court was told.
The Quinn family may be hiding up to €500m in undisclosed assets from the Irish Bank Resolution Corporation, the unidentified informants have told the bank.
Use of informants marks ‘a new low’
However the Quinns came out fighting yesterday. A statement from the family said the allegations had been based on ‘illegally obtained information from unidentified informants with criminal backgrounds’.
It added that the allegations marked ‘a new low’.
‘We are simply astonished that a State-controlled entity would be a party to such ethically and legally questionable actions,’ the statement said.
The claims heard in court included allegations that the Quinns had told an informant to buy €300m in gold.
The family’s statement continued: ‘The allegations concerning €300m gold and €200m cash are absolute scurrilous lies and denied by the family in the strongest possible terms. The bank has been led on a wild goose chase by individu- als who do not even have the decency to make themselves known to the courts.’
The statement said it had disclosed ‘the full extent of its assets to the court’.
Under court orders last year the family disclosed assets with a value of approximately €1m, an amount the bank says is inherently implausible.
The bank, now in liquidation, did a deal with the informants last year whereby they are to get 3% of any cash recovered as a result of their information.
Mr Justice Kelly was told yesterday that ‘gagging orders’ that applied to orders sought earlier this year in London and Delaware have now been lifted and the bank was now informing the court. It would inform the Quinn family about the development, the court heard.
The UK and US orders resulted in the IBRC liquidators getting information about email traffic between particular email addresses which, the court was told, include a number of emails between par- ties connected with a ‘scheme’ which the bank believes is part of a conspiracy to put Quinn assets beyond IBRC’s reach.
One of the two special liquidators to the IBRC, Kieran Wallace, told the court by affidavit that the identities of the informants ‘and their source’ had not been disclosed to the English or US courts as he believed that they would be at substantial personal risk if their identities were revealed.
The bank told the court yesterday email material recovered by the bank shows traffic between a number of parties, including an address which the informants said was ‘an alias email address used by the Quinn family’.
The emails are said to show correspondence between June 2012 and February 2014, between accounts associated with the Quinn Group and a Dubai-based businessman who has denied involvement with the alleged scheme.
Mr Gallagher told Mr Justice Kelly the bank had the details of the email traffic, and expected to get the actual content of much of the emails next week by way of the US court.