In October 2012, Seán Quinn jnr was in Mountjoy Prison because of a finding by Ms Justice Elizabeth Dunne some months earlier that he was guilty of an "outrageous" contempt of court.
In June 2011, the courts had ordered him and other members of his extended family to desist from a scheme they had instigated to put a foreign property portfolio worth hundreds of millions of euro beyond the reach of Anglo Irish Bank at a time when the bank said it was owed €2.8 billion from the family and had legal claims on the property.
Ms Justice Dunne found that Quinn jnr, his father Seán snr, and Seán snr’s nephew Peter Darragh Quinn were all guilty of contempt for continuing with the conspiracy after they had been told to desist. They were all given jail sentences.
In October 2012, the Supreme Court heard an appeal from Quinn jnr, who said he had been told he would be jailed indefinitely if he did not purge his contempt, but it was not in his power to do so.
The reason for this was that, while the family had agreed it had taken certain steps involving a law firm in Dubai, Senat, setting up companies in Belize and Panama, and had discussed their scheme with lawyers in Moscow, its position by October of 2012 was that it had lost control of the scheme, and that other mysterious parties were now in control of assets that included a high-rise commercial block in Moscow and a shopping mall in central Kiev, as well as associated rent rolls of approximately $35 million a year.
Double-cross
Mr Justice Donal O’Donnell characterised the position as being that the family had set out to double-cross the bank but had in turn been double-crossed by the agents in Russia and elsewhere that it had used to put the plan into operation.
Paul Gallagher SC, for the bank, said that was the family’s position, but that the State-owned bank did not accept the family’s claim that it had lost control of the assets.
He told the court that the scheme put in place by the Quinns was “so undermining of the rule of law and the administration of justice that it is without parallel”.
Both sides have maintained their positions ever since. The Quinns are limbering up for a massive court case where they will challenge the legal basis for the claim by IBRC that it is owed more than €2 billion (there is no dispute over €455 million of the total debt). The bank, meanwhile, continues with its inquiries into what it claims is an ongoing fraudulent conspiracy by the family to wrongly hold on to massively valuable assets.
Unknown to the Quinn family, up until yesterday morning, the bank’s efforts included the following up of leads that were given to it by two mysterious informants.
Having been approached by the informants in February of last year by way of criminal law solicitor Michael Staines, the bank did a deal with the two agreeing that they would receive 3 per cent of any money retrieved as a result of information given. Having been supplied with certain information, the bank approached courts in London, England, and Delaware in the US seeking information and also gagging orders so the Quinn family would not know what was happening.
While claims concerning Investec Bank did not lead anywhere, information from Yahoo appears to show a whole series of contacts between email addresses notified to the bank by the informants, and parties associated with the alleged conspiracy.
Law firm
These latter parties include: Peter Darragh Quinn; Michael Waechter, of Senat, a law firm and business consultancy based in Dubai and elsewhere, that the IBRC believes is centrally involved in organising the conspiracy (Waechter told
The Irish Times
a few weeks ago that this was untrue); Artur Zafarov, a lawyer with the Moscow-based firm A&B that Peter Quinn consulted in relation to putting assets beyond the IBRC’s reach; Dmitry Shukutorov, another lawyer with A&B; Max Machinchuck, a lawyer based in Kiev; Andrey Golyshev, who ran a property company for the Quinns in Moscow; and KO Nogotkov, who acted in relation to another property company in Russia.
The subject headings and content of these emails is expected to be released by Yahoo in the US to the bank next week by way of the court in Delaware.
The email traffic runs up to February of this year.
Any evidence that any member of the Quinn family has continued to be party to efforts to keep assets beyond the reach of the bank after June 2011 could have very serious consequences.
