Funds paid to Quinn firm from Ukraine

AN IRISH company owned by a trust set up for the grandchildren of bankrupt businessman Seán Quinn was paid $650,000 last year by a Ukrainian company which is part of the international property group the State-owned Irish Bank Resolution Corporation wants to seize.

The money was paid into an AIB account in Blanchardstown, Dublin. The payments were made on foot of a contract agreed prior to the High Court ordering the Quinn family to stop asset-stripping the property group.

A second Irish company, owned by the wider Quinn family, was also paid substantial amounts in 2011.

The previously unreported payments are set out in an affidavit of Seán Quinn jnr, filed by him to the High Court in July when he was sent to jail for contempt.

In the document, Mr Quinn sets out certain matters concerning Cranre Property Services Ltd, with an address in Blanchardstown, Dublin.

The company was incorporated in April last year. Mr Quinn’s brothers-in-law, Niall McPartland and Stephen Kelly, are its directors, and the company’s shares are held by a Swedish entity, Irish Trust AB.

Mr Quinn jnr said in his affidavit to Ms Justice Elizabeth Dunne that the company was ultimately owned by the Cranaghan Foundation, a foundation set up for the benefit of his parents’ grandchildren.

He said that in April 2011, the company took over a services contract with Univermag, a company operating a shopping mall in Kiev. The contract was agreed at a time when IBRC was seizing the Quinn Group from the family.

Mr Quinn jnr said he was advised by Mr Kelly that the terms of the contract were agreed between Mr Kelly and Larissa Yanez Puga, who ran Univermag for the family and whom the bank has been trying to depose.

Cranre received a $350,000 signing-on fee on July 8th, 2011, two payments of $100,000 each on September 2nd, 2011, and a further payment of $100,000 on September 3rd, arising from invoices for the months of June, July and August 2011.

Mr Quinn said he was told by Mr Kelly that Michael Waechter, of Senat FZC, Dubai, sourced a company called Letynaya, to act as a property services company in relation to the Kiev mall. Letynaya is based in the United Arab Emirates.

Mr Kelly agreed a contract between Cranre and Letynaya in August 2011, according to Mr Quinn. As part of this contract, Letynaya was to be paid €320,000 by Cranre, which it was in November 2011.

Since then, he said, the family has ended its role with Univermag and has sought the return of some of the money paid to Letynaya. “Letynaya refused this request,” Mr Quinn said in his affidavit.

He said the balance of the money that remained with Cranre “was used to pay general office expenses over the course of the last 12 months or so”.

Mr Quinn’s affidavit was filed after he was found to have acted in contempt of an order issued by Mr Justice Frank Clarke on June 21st, 2011, instructing the Quinns to stop their efforts to put the assets of the property group beyond the bank’s reach. Mr Quinn said another Irish firm, Neacad Ltd, also based in Blanchardstown, was incorporated in May 2011 for the benefit of the wider Quinn family. It received $400,000 from Finansstroy, a Russian company associated with the valuable Kutzoff Tower in Moscow.

Neacad’s contract has since been “outsourced” to Dubai-based Al Raea Real Estate, a company located by Senat for Mr Kelly.

Mr Quinn said the Neacad contract was not a mechanism for extracting income from the international property group.