Tale that began with £100 could end in tears

IT is a rags-to-riches tale that without skilled intervention could yet end in tears for Sean Quinn.

The troubled Quinn Group’s business empire stretches from wind farms in Fermanagh to Turkish shopping malls, along the way encompassing Drumcondra pubs and Cavan cement factories.

The group currently employs in excess of 7,000 people in Ireland, Britain, Europe, Russia and India.

Despite its long reach, Mr Quinn has centred his investments, and his power, in the Cavan-Fermanagh border region, surrounding the 23-acre farm where he first began quarrying gravel in 1973.

According to the 62-year- old businessman, the quarrying firm got under way with a borrowed £100 investment.

A former captain of the Fermanagh Gaelic Football team, he used his GAA contacts to quickly establish a dominant position in the supply of sand and gravel to local builders and farmers.

Throughout the 1970s, the company developed its product range to include all manner of building materials.

With this successful base, the business expanded into the national market in the 1980s, with the establishment of a roof tile factory, a pre-stressed concrete factory and a 0.5 million tonnes per annum cement works in Mr Quinn’s home village of Derrylin.

With the establishment of a concrete products manufacturing plant in Williamstown, Co Galway, Quinn’s business was well on its way to challenging CRH’s dominance of the Irish cement market.

By 2000 this core business venture was posed to take full advantage of the building boom when it opened a second cement works at Ballyconnell, Co Cavan. This plant has a capacity to produce in excess of 1.3 million tonnes per annum. But the late ’80s and 1990s had also seen Quinn diversifying his interests, into plastic food container production, based in a Cavan factory, and property with the Cat & Cage in Drumcondra the first pub bought in 1984.

In little more than a decade Mr Quinn had expanded his pub collection to include several Dublin hostelries including Messrs Maguires and the Barge Inn, as well as seven hotels, including Buswells, the Crowne Plaza in Cambridge and the 220-room Slieve Russell in Cavan.

Skilfully utilising business grants which flowed into Northern Ireland to cement the peace process in 1995, Mr Quinn began operating a landfill site at Lisbane, Tandragee, Co Armagh — accepting hazardous and non-hazardous waste.

By 1996 Quinn was using his capital base to expand into insurance, with Quinn-Direct initially based in Fermoy, Co Cork.

The company priced its products competitively, creating dedicated call centres and concentrating on phone and internet-based business — a strategy that would eventually make the insurance arm of the Quinn empire the second largest general insurer in Ireland.

On January 1, 2000, the group launched Quinn Life, with a new product range for pensions and savings.

But even then the signs of Mr Quinn’s passion for gambling were evident.

In 2001 Quinn Direct recorded an investment loss of £15.6 million due to an aggressive strategy of investing heavily in technology stocks. Almost 37% of Quinn-Direct’s reserves were invested in equities at the end of 2000. The industry average was 22%.

Mr Quinn would explain away this misadventure by claiming that with the dip in the technology market he saw “an opportunity to get into” it “but we paid a heavy price for that decision”.

Mr Quinn’s first pub, the Cat and Cage, is little over 200 metres from Bertie Ahern’s political headquarters at St Luke’s, and another pub — Quinn’s — is also based in Drumcondra.

And with his growing businesses came political influence and a developing relationship with Anglo Irish bank.

The Quinn empire flourished, with the numbers employed in the non-union businesses tripling in the decade following 2000.

The new decade also saw the Quinn Group expand into the glass container market, with new factories in his northern bailiwick, together with two British plants added.

In 2005, work commenced on a new radiator production facility in Newport, South Wales.

The decision was also taken that year to invest in a 19,000sq m state-of-the-art packaging facility in Ballyconnell, close to the Quinn Group Headquarters.

The purchase of BUPA Ireland saw Quinn move into the private healthcare market. The company began trading as Quinn Healthcare in April 2007.

While in the background Quinn was taking outrageous punts on Anglo Irish shares, a move that may eventually have fatally undermined his empire, the expansion continued.

Recent years have also seen the group’s global ambitions take flight with the group’s property arm investing in Moscow and other cities in the Russian Federation.

Quinn Energy has recently installed a Landfill Gas Generator at their Lisbane Landfill site in Tandragee.