Quinns 'unable to purge contempt'

Aoife Quinn, daughter of bankrupt businessman Seán Quinn, has said that her father will join her brother in jail because they cannot purge contempt of court orders as they don’t have “a pot of gold” or control over assets that they had moved beyond the reach of the former Anglo Irish Bank.

In her first television interview, Ms Quinn said the family were unable to purge contempt of court orders to reverse the transfer of assets in the family’s international property group beyond the State-owned bank’s reach without its cooperation.

“There is no pot of gold there. People think that we have a pot of gold sitting under our beds at home. We do not have a pot of gold,” Ms Quinn said on TV3’s Tonight with Sam Smyth programme to be broadcast at 11pm tonight.

“There is a receiver appointed over each and every one of our assets. Where is this pot of gold that people think that we have? It doesn't exist. If Daddy’s bankruptcy manager were able to find it or if it existed, he would have found it. It is not there.

“You cannot give what you do not have. We do not have these assets so we can't give them back,” she told Mr Smyth who is standing in for broadcaster Vincent Browne on the programme.

Ms Quinn said the family could help the bank, which is now called Irish Bank Resolution Corporation (IBRC), try to recover the assets and “litigate our way out of this”.

“But unless Anglo accepts our proposal to do that, unfortunately Seán is going to sit in jail and unfortunately it appears that our father is going to join him there and they are going to stay there until Anglo decide to cooperate, be that months or years, but unfortunately the decision is completely out of our hands,” Ms Quinn said.

IBRC declined to respond to her comments on the programme which was recorded on Monday.

She confirmed she had visited her brother, Seán jnr, in Mountjoy Prison where he is serving a three-month sentence for the contempt of court orders for asset-stripping in the Quinn property business.

He was “coping under the circumstances” and it was “an exceptionally difficult situation,” she said. Her father, brother and cousin Peter Darragh Quinn would have purged their contempt by now if they had the ability to do so, she said.

“There is no way I would leave, that any member of our family would leave our brother sitting in Mountjoy Prison tonight for the sake of not purging contempt, for the sake of sitting on your hands,” said Ms Quinn, who is Mr Quinn’s second youngest daughter.

“This suggestion that anybody is sitting on their hands is absolutely false and absolutely incorrect.”