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.”

Stephen Kelly, Ms Quinn’s husband who also appeared on the programme, confirmed the family transferred a Russian property company worth $13 million (€10.6 million) to him in return for a laptop computer.

“I never denied I done that transaction,” he said, adding that the company had debts of $15 million and was in negative equity.

“If Anglo had proper security like they are alleging do you think that would be possible? Could I take your house off you, if you had a mortgage with a bank, for a laptop?” said Mr Kelly.

The family had admitted to moving assets within the family’s international property portfolio to prevent Anglo securing control of them, he said.

“We never denied we moved assets. We have said it in open court we moved assets,” he said.

Asked whether the family business, Quinn Group, had paid for the cost of their wedding in 2010, Ms Quinn said that she didn’t know.

“All of our personal and company dealings were all dealt with from Derrylin, from [the Quinn Group] head office in Derrylin. That went for everything - from wills advice, from tax advice, from personal expenses,” she said.

“We owned the companies. The companies looked after all our tax affairs. Everything was dealt with appropriately down in Derrylin.”

Ms Quinn said on the programme that Peter Darragh Quinn, who was sentenced to three months in prison but who failed to appear in court last month and has been photographed at GAA matches in Northern Ireland, was “living his life in his home” and “sitting in his house in Fermanagh”. She said that to say he was “wanted” by the courts was a “very dramatic way of putting it”.

A court warrant for his arrest is outstanding since last month.

Ms Quinn repeated her claim that Anglo acted in complete disregard to the validity of the security supporting loans of €2.34 billion when it moved to take control of the Quinn Group which she owned with her brother and three sisters.

The Quinn children and their mother have taken a legal action against the bank claiming that the €2.34 billion in loans cannot be called in because they are “tainted with illegality” as they were advanced by Anglo for the purpose of propping up the bank’s share price during the summer of 2008.

Prior to the programme’s broadcast, TV3 issued a statement saying that Ms Quinn asked the station to clarify a comment she had made during the programme, in which she said that Peter Darragh Quinn owned a tower block in Kiev. She asked to clarify that Mr Quinn owned the Kutuzoff Tower in Moscow, not a property in Kiev.