Sean Quinn son begins prison term

CLICKABLE

Moscow

Moscow skyline

The Kutuzoff tower block generates an estimated £14m ($22m) a year in rent and it should have been the Anglo Irish bank's biggest payback. Again, it had been signed away into a network of companies.

Stockholm

Stockholm old town

A secret boardroom coup allowed the Quinn family to take control of the company and move assets that had been used as security for loans from the Anglo Irish Bank out of the reach of the bank.

Derrylin, County Fermanagh

Derrylin, County Fermanagh

Sean Quinn started in business on his family farm with a £100 ($150) loan to extract gravel. He expanded into manufacturing, insurance and property, becoming a billionaire in the process.

Dublin

Sean Quinn was declared bankrupt in the Irish Republic, owing £2bn ($3bn) to the then Anglo Irish Bank. The bank was taken over by the state and its only role now is to recover money for the Irish taxpayer.

Switzerland

A Quinn family trust was set up in Switzerland at the same time as the Belize shell companies were being bought.

Kiev

Kiev shopping mall

One of Quinn's biggest property assets was a large shopping mall generating £600,000 ($1m) a month. The bank was locked out and the mall was signed away into a network of companies.

British Virgin Islands

Cash from Ukraine passed through at least one company claiming to be owed money by the Quinn-owned property empire.

Belize

Belize postbox

Much of the missing money, including £100m ($157m) to a single company, went to a series of shell companies here. The registered addresses of the companies were this postbox.

Vanuatu

The South Pacific island became a target in the search for Sean Quinn's missing millions after investigations in Australia. Vanuatu specialises in off-shore banking and offers strict secrecy and no taxes for investors.

Australia

Investigators from the Irish Banking Resolution Corporation flew to Sydney and Melbourne in search of £400m ($600m) of Sean Quinn's disappearing millions.

The son of bankrupt billionaire Sean Quinn has started an indefinite sentence in Mountjoy prison for hiding millions from a bank owed £2bn.

Sean Quinn junior and Peter Darragh Quinn, Sean Quinn senior's nephew, were sentenced by the High Court in Dublin.

Peter Darragh Quinn failed to appear in court and an arrest warrant was issued.

Sean Quinn senior avoided jail but must co-operate with the Irish Bank Resolution Corporation within three months.

Sean jnr and Peter Darragh Quinn will be jailed until the contempt of court in breaching an order not to put 500m euro of overseas property assets beyond the reach of the former Anglo Irish bank is purged.

Counsel for the Quinns said this was 'almost medieval'.

The three had breached a court order by putting international property beyond the reach of the IBRC.

They were found to be in contempt of court in June.

At that time, the judge ordered them to reverse the movement of assets out of the reach of the IRBC, the state-owned former Anglo Irish Bank.

The Irish state bailed out the Anglo Irish bank when it failed and the IBRC's function is now to recover money for the Irish taxpayer.

The bank is owed £2bn by Sean Quinn and sought to recover some of that from property owned by Quinn in Russia and Ukraine.

However, the bank found itself locked out of the company that controlled the Quinn property portfolio and found that the money and ownership was disappearing into a network of companies across the world.

At the height of his success, Sean Quinn was the 12th richest man in the UK and the richest in Ireland, employing thousands, mostly in the previously job-starved cross-border area of Fermanagh and Cavan.

In April 2011, control of his business empire passed into the hands of the IBRC.

Later that year Sean Quinn declared himself bankrupt in a Belfast court, making him the biggest bankrupt in UK history.

The IBRC challenged his right to bankruptcy in the UK and successfully fought to transfer him to the jurisdiction of courts in the Irish Republic.

More on This Story

Sean Quinn's financial troubles

More Northern Ireland stories

RSS

Features & Analysis

Elsewhere on the BBC

  • Green city A leaf from nature's book

    Cities rely on systems which pollute our world, but that will all change in the future, writes Rachel Armstrong

Programmes

  • A graphic of a person and the Earth respresenting the world wide webClick Watch

    David Reid visits Cern to find out about the plans to restore the world's first web page

BBC © 2013 The BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites. Read more.

This page is best viewed in an up-to-date web browser with style sheets (CSS) enabled. While you will be able to view the content of this page in your current browser, you will not be able to get the full visual experience. Please consider upgrading your browser software or enabling style sheets (CSS) if you are able to do so.