State faces Catch 22 situation if Quinn seeks more taxpayers’ money

SEÁN QUINN has a brass neck. The businessman would be central to any public investigation into the banking crisis that has crippled the country, yet he regularly opines publicly on what government and citizens need to do to rescue the country from a situation which he was involved in creating.

Quinn’s actions were a major contributor to the disaster at Anglo-Irish Bank. The circumstances in which his shareholding in the bank was reduced from 25% to 15% are the subject of an ongoing investigation by the Office of the Director of Corporate Enforcement and the gardaí (and have created hundreds of millions in euro of losses for the state because the 10 buyers of those shares borrowed the money from Anglo to buy them and cannot repay their debts to the now state-owned bank).

The manner in which Quinn secretly accrued the original shareholding – by gambling through a device called “contracts for difference” to avoid public scrutiny and apparently without the relevant permission from the Financial Regulator – created not only a major loss estimated at about €1 billion for him but contributed to the destabilising of the Anglo share price. Loans that his business empire received from Anglo at the same time as he was trying to arrange payment for those shares must also face legal independent scrutiny.