Derek Quinlan (76), a former Irish tax inspector-turned brash property tycoon, was in good mood heading into the final weekend of November last year. The bright promise of a fresh start beckoned.
He had amassed more than €3.5 billion of debts in the Celtic Tiger and went bankrupt in London in 2022. His 12-month stint in bankruptcy was due to automatically end last November 23rd, a Thursday.
Quinlan, who was always known to enjoy a good party, said he gathered his family around him to celebrate his newfound financial freedom that weekend in London, where he lived with his wife Siobhán and their grown-up children in a £2.5 million (€3 million) house in the west of the city.
But on the Monday morning the celebrations halted. Quinlan collected his post, which included a letter from bankruptcy officials. Instead of confirming the good news that he was now a financially free man, it said his discharge had been suspended by an order of the High Court of England and Wales.
He was to stay in economic purgatory, a financial ward of court shackled to the failures of his buccaneering past. These included debts such as the €403 million he still owed to Irish taxpayers through the State property agency Nama.
[ From the archive: Who is Derek Quinlan?Opens in new window ]
“I was absolutely shocked when I opened the letter,” Quinlan told the court when he tried to appeal the suspension. He complained he had “no warning whatsoever” that his discharge might be stopped. A confused Quinlan said he thought he had a “good rapport” with his court-appointed bankruptcy trustees from the London firm Begbies Traynor.
“I had no idea that my trustees were unsatisfied with my conduct. I was a fully co-operative and compliant bankrupt,” he said. “I honestly want to get on with my life and return to business.”
Unknown to Quinlan, his fate had been sealed on a Microsoft Teams call the previous Wednesday afternoon, 10 hours before he had been due to automatically exit bankruptcy.
On the call were Judge Nicholas Briggs of the High Court’s insolvency division; Sam Harrison, appearing for the Official Receiver, a civil servant with control of Quinlan’s affairs as a bankrupt; and Jacob Beake, one of the Begbies Traynor trustees managing the case.
On the agenda was Quinlan’s future. A minute of the Teams call obtained by The Irish Times showed the meeting was scheduled “urgently” to discuss “worrying” aspects of his conduct. The receiver, advised by Beake, asked the judge to suspend Quinlan’s discharge.
Quinlan said his only income was a monthly pension of £3,000 and ‘you can’t live on that with three children’. They were aged in their 20s when he went bankrupt
Beake read a report that Begbies Traynor had prepared to back up its case. It cited several reasons why the trustees believed Quinlan should not be released into financial freedom.
They included his failure to hand over statements for bank accounts in Monaco, one of which he closed in 2022 on the day of his bankruptcy order; and his general insistence that he kept no financial records, which the trustees worried he possibly possessed but did not provide.
Among transactions that had caused concern was the €65 million sale to a Kazakh billionaire in 2011 of his luxurious villa in Cap Ferrat in France, and whether cash was left over for Quinlan’s benefit. He had also initially “forgotten” to tell the Official Receiver that he was due to receive €317,000 from a property deal with Avestus Capital Partners, the successor of his old firm.
But chief among the “worries” was a €2.5 million tax rebate he got in 2018 from Revenue in the Republic, which he immediately lodged in his wife’s account to fund their lifestyle – they lived in Monaco at the time in a block where apartments reputedly rented for €30,000 per month.
Quinlan hadn’t declared this transfer to his bankruptcy trustees. The judge found this “concerning”.
“This payment was made [to his wife] at a time when he was heavily insolvent,” Beake wrote. It was also made on the same day a statutory demand for payment of €120 million had been delivered by one of Quinlan’s creditors, Edgeworth Capital, controlled by British tycoon Robert Tchenguiz.
“The trustees are concerned that there are other undisclosed assets which may have been transferred away by the debtor [Quinlan] in the lead up to his bankruptcy,” Beake wrote in his report.
Quinlan’s explanation for the rebate transfer was that Siobhán Quinlan covered the family’s living expenses after he got into difficulties after the crash, and the money was needed to fund their future lifestyle. Quinlan said his only income was a monthly pension of £3,000 and “you can’t live on that with three children”. They were aged in their 20s when he went bankrupt.
“Siobhán had paid everything. Kept us alive,” he told the trustees. His wife, he said, had made a lot of money selling a stake in the Fibonacci Square property development near AIB’s headquarters in Ballsbridge. He said none of that cash was his.
Quinlan said the tax rebate was owed from a joint return made with his wife in 2004, when he was at the height of his powers in business. Fourteen years later, the €2.5 million was lodged by Revenue to his personal account, even though he was in Nama with huge debts to Irish taxpayers.
He was advised on the rebate by Dublin firm Beechwood Partners, whose principals included former employees of his. The trustees later complained of difficulty obtaining his Beechwood records. Beake said Quinlan had declared only one set of advisers on his bankruptcy questionnaire, but he had really dealt with many others. Beake said chasing down all Quinlan’s advisers and their records delayed its investigation of his finances by nine months.
Cap Ferrat, where Quinlan had owned a villa until 2011, was the second-most expensive residential location in the world at the time. The most expensive was Monaco, where Quinlan would later move.
A report by a French law firm showed Quinlan bought his lavish Cap Ferrat villa for €41 million in 2006 with cash and a €30 million AIB mortgage. It was later remortgaged and the debt bought by Barclays. Quinlan’s bankruptcy trustees believed their documents showed Barclays was owed about €56 million, leaving a surplus of more than €8 million when it was sold. Where did it go?
Quinlan told the bankruptcy court notarial documents in French showed Barclays in fact got €62.25 million and, after taxes, a surplus of just €324,000 remained. He said most of this went on various fees, and only “about €10,000 or €15,000″ was left over, which he lodged to his personal account and spent on his lifestyle. He said he held no records about the villa.
The trustees noted official documents for the villa sale listed an Irish address for correspondence on Quinlan’s side. It was the offices of Dixon Quinlan solicitors, founded by Quinlan’s late aunt and now run by his first cousin, Michael Quinlan, a former president of the Law Society. Derek Quinlan had not declared his cousin’s firm on any of his lists of advisers in the bankruptcy.
The trustees said they initially had difficulty getting records from the firm, although Quinlan had signed a letter of authority allowing their release. Beake said he hired Dublin firm Mason Hayes & Curran (MHC) to chase it up. MHC told Beake that when they asked Michael Quinlan for his cousin’s records, he told them Derek had said “just tell them you don’t have anything”.
Beake laid out his concerns about all of this to the court. Following the suspension of his bankruptcy exit, Derek Quinlan lodged an angry letter sent to him by his cousin Michael. Referring to the trustees’ “innuendo”, the solicitor said: “I do not like what is being suggested. Are the trustees saying I hid something because you told me to? This is wrong and they know it, and so do MHC.”
Michael Quinlan said he had never received any correspondence about the French villa and it was “ridiculous” to suggest anyone other than a French lawyer would have handled it. He said MHC quoted him out of context, and his cousin had actually told him to “give them what I could”. He said he only held accounting records but couldn’t access them on his new IT system.
Beake further told the court he was concerned about Derek Quinlan’s apparent lack of records, and this tallied with criticism of him in a 2021 judgment by Judge Anthony Mann, who had ruled on disclosure when Quinlan was battling his entry into bankruptcy. Quinlan had once belatedly “found” a laptop with vital records in Monaco 18 months after he had first been asked for the information.
Mann also criticised Quinlan for seeking a court adjournment on the basis he had been admitted to intensive care in Monaco. The judge said medical files showed this was “simply not true ... [and] the adjournment was procured on the footing of inaccurate, if not untruthful, medical evidence”.
Beake used Mann’s admonishment to highlight Quinlan’s later reliance on his health difficulties as a reason for his occasionally delayed engagement with the trustees. He also complained he would not tell him the identity of a mystery person who had paid towards his legal fees; Quinlan would only say it was a “politically exposed” man in New York with top level connections.
Quinlan has rejected the complaints about his conduct as “baseless and unfair”. He said he would have given more information about the tax rebate if he was asked. He said he has signed every specific letter given to him. He said he had no records for Cap Ferrat and that, in general, he had been as co-operative as possible. He said he had “voluntarily” declared the Avestus €317,000 once he had been reminded of it by the firm. Quinlan rejected any suggestion of wrongdoing.
On the November 2023 Teams call, Judge Briggs made a short-term order suspending Quinlan’s discharge. Quinlan appealed this but it was not lifted. A longer suspension until November 2024 was confirmed during the summer.
As of this month, that had yet to be challenged. Quinlan’s looming financial fate remains unclear.
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 currently his automatic exit date.
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