Where once Derek Quinlan had joined rampaging City types hunting London property deals, now they were hunting him.
It was two weeks before Christmas, 2018. Iranian-British businessman Robert Tchenguiz’s Edgeworth Capital wanted to serve Quinlan, Ireland’s biggest boomtime financier but now hopelessly bust, with a demand for repayment on a €120 million debt. It was a precursor to forcing him in to bankruptcy.
But first it had to serve him with the correct legal papers. Oliver Blundell, a solicitor with a City firm hired by Edgeworth, tracked Quinlan down one Wednesday afternoon to Fetter Lane, halfway between the West End and the financial district. Ironically, it was yards from the bankruptcy court.
Quinlan knew what would happen if his creditor found him and seemed determined not to make it easy. Blundell spotted him at 12.30pm standing outside a Pret-a-Manger cafe. He told Quinlan he had a letter for him but the Irishman wouldn’t take it. Blundell tried to leave it with him.
“I let it fall in front of him. Mr Quinlan walked over the envelope,” he said. He followed him to a zebra crossing but Quinlan kept ignoring him and walked off towards Fleet Street. Blundell followed.
“I let the envelope drop in front of him and he once again walked over it,” said Blundell, in legal papers unearthed by The Irish Times after it got a court order to inspect Quinlan’s bankruptcy file.
Blundell gave up. Later that afternoon, the papers were delivered by hand in an envelope addressed to Quinlan at an office on Berkeley Square used by the Irishman. The same day they were returned with a note scribbled on the envelope: “DQ not here.”
An appointment letter for December 21st was sent to Quinlan a few days later by registered post, confirming he would be served then. William Stevens, an agent who specialised in serving legal papers, showed up at the allotted time on the 21st to give the legal papers to the Irishman.
A security guard allowed him to leave the envelope, but said Quinlan was not there. Quinlan would later confirm he had boarded an EasyJet flight on December 14th to Nice in France for Christmas, and would not return until the second week in January.
But by then the game was up. Quinlan’s futile fight to avoid the petition ended and his fight to defeat it in court began. London would remain the theatre of war.
“You know, Ireland Inc was in a good state and we [just] grew the business,” Quinlan would later muse to a bankruptcy trustee, as he raked over his career as a property investor during Ireland’s Celtic Tiger era.
But when the former tax inspector’s empire outgrew the State, he went to London for more profits. There he made his mark, such as the day in 2004 when he shed a tear as they raised the tricolour over Claridge’s, the jewel in a luxury hotel group his consortium bought for £750 million (€899 million).
‘Friends’ had funded Quinlan’s lifestyle for years ... He listed household grocery costs of £3,500 per month with a further £1,000 allocated for alcohol
Fourteen years later, as solicitors chased him around that Christmas time, London had left its mark on the now bust and depleted Quinlan. He had been badly stung by the preceding decade’s crash.
Quinlan and another property tycoon, Glenn Maud, had in 2008 bought the Madrid headquarters of Santander bank for €1.9 billion. The deal included €200 million of mezzanine – short term, high cost – debt that they had personally guaranteed, which was to lead to Quinlan’s downfall.
A decade on from the deal, the mezzanine debt had fallen into the hands of the flamboyant Tchenguiz. Quinlan’s share had grown to €120 million, a debt the Irishman later estimated Tchenguiz bought for €5,000.
Quinlan fought Tchenguiz’s Edgeworth bankruptcy petition for almost four years. But soon after losing a disclosure battle over records held by his Irish debt advisers, Gerry Murphy and Owen Kelly, Quinlan threw in the towel and in November 2022 he was declared bankrupt on his own application.
He ultimately blamed Nama, the Irish State agency set up to deal with the domestic banks’ soured property loans. Nama had taken over €3.5 billion of his debts. He repaid €3.1 billion after an asset fire sale, but knew he could never find the €403 million rump debt Nama wouldn’t write off: “I now recognise Nama will never compromise.”
Quinlan was famous during the boom years for his love of the finer things in life. From November 2022 onwards, he would have to answer for every detail of his expenditure to an Official Receiver, essentially a bankruptcy civil servant, and his trustees at the firm Begbies Traynor.
Quinlan’s initial bankruptcy questionnaire for the Receiver on December 13th, 2022, showed he had £40 in cash. He had £47 in a sterling bank account and €68 in another account. He owned no car and declared almost no assets of any description, apart from a four-year-old MacBook Pro and an iPad.
His only income, according to his declaration, was the Irish State old-age pension, converted to sterling at £876 per month, a €445 monthly pension from his six years as a Revenue tax inspector, and another €2,077 per month in an Aviva private pension.
He listed two closed bank accounts in Monaco – he would later have a disagreement with his bankruptcy trustees over access to their bank statements.
He listed his creditors as £344.75 million owed to Nama, the sterling then-equivalent of his €403 million shortfall. He owed £1.1 million in legal fees and a £521,000 capital contribution to the Nollaig Partnership, a Dublin property consortium. Quinlan also listed a £4,299 “loan from a friend” owed to Cha Cha Assaf, a resident of Ailesbury Road, Dublin 4. “Friends” had funded his lifestyle for years.
Quinlan, his wife Siobhán and their grown-up children were living together in a rented six-bedroomed luxury house on Fulham Palace Road in west London. The rent was listed at almost £99,000 per year, paid annually upfront. Quinlan listed household grocery costs of £3,500 per month with a further £1,000 allocated for alcohol.
He suggested taxis and Ubers were costing £300 per month. Quinlan said his wife covered the rest of their monthly expenditure of £15,000, beyond his £3,000 pension income.
A second bankruptcy questionnaire for the trustees included a newly declared asset, a €317,000 payout by Avestus Capital Partners from a property deal that he said he had simply “forgotten” previously. It also included a new spending item: £200 per month for hairdressers, likely a reference to other household members, given Quinlan’s relatively unadorned male pate.
Mr Quinlan was contacted for comment by The Irish Times in relation to the legal papers attaching to his UK bankruptcy. 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.
Quinlan once sat on top of a property empire, the king of his world, but now he had to face the ignominy of having to account to outsiders for personal grooming costs.
“I never thought we’d be in this situation,” he later told his trustees.
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