Quinn family ‘potential source of Anglo tapes’

The liquidators of IBRC identified the entire Quinn Family and its advisers as potential sources of the leaked Anglo Tapes.

It said it was apparent the recordings, which were first published by Independent newspapers in June, were those that had been made available to the banking regulators, the gardaí and parties involved in the Quinns’ legal battle with the now defunct financial institution.

But it said its investigation to see who was actually responsible was ongoing.

IBRC’s special liquidators, KPMG, provided its list of suspects to the Department of Finance as part of a draft response to a parliamentary question.

This was on Jul 1, just as it appointed Deloitte and McCann Fitzgerald to conduct an investigation into the source of the information first published by the Sunday Independent.

KPMG told the department that based on the first week of published tapes, it believed they had been provided to people investigating the bank and to those involved the Quinns’ legal case.

“They form part of data sets that are held by or have been provided to the following parties… The bank itself, the Garda Bureau of Fraud Investigation, such other regulatory parties to whom the GBFI might have provided those materials, the participants in the Quinn family litigation, Sean Quinn Snr, Patricia Quinn, Aoife Quinn, Sean Quinn Jnr, Colette Quinn and Brenda Quinn, and related third party proceedings,” it read.

The department has said KPMG was merely setting out a factual position on who would have got the tapes and there was no insinuation that any of those listed had supplied the material to the media.

The draft response, prepared by KPMG and released under the Freedom of Information Act, also named two former senior figures in the Quinn group.

Two hours later, KPMG sent a new draft to the department which deleted the reference to the Quinns and it asked for the earlier version to be disregarded.

Recently, Sean Quinn Snr told the Ballinamore Festival that the Irish Independent and its journalist Paul Williams had “done more to expose what went on than all the other media put together”.

The Quinns were contacted yesterday but did not make a statement.

The Quinns were not identified in the parliamentary answer supplied to Sinn Féin’s Pearse Doherty on Jul 2 in response to his original question.

In the final response, Finance Minister Michael Noonan named the gardaí and regulatory bodies as potential sources of the leak.

This said the recordings had been given to “participants and advisers involved in the various civil litigation the bank is involved in”.

On Jul 4, Mr Noonan was asked at an event about the potential source of the leak and but said beyond the gardaí, he did not “know of anybody else who has the tapes”.