Downloaded from YTS.MX
[suspenseful music]
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Official YIFY movies site: YTS.MX
[suspenseful music]
- There's achievers in life and there's destructors in life.
I'm one of the achievers.
What I want to be remembered for the man that they tried
to bury and they weren't able to bury him.
[upbeat music]
[upbeat music continues]
When you drive up that mountain road and you see
all the factories, the windmills on the skyline,
everything is down to the one man.
You're talking about factories covering maybe 200 acres.
- [Ian] They had this one thing up in Cavan and Fermanagh.
They had Quinn.
- He was on the Forbes list of billionaires.
- [Reporter] Sean Quinn is fighting the courts over loans
of nearly 3 billion Euro.
- [News Anchor] Businessman Sean Quinn has been declared
bankrupt at-
- [Reporter 2] The former billionaire Sean Quinn
has been jailed for nine weeks for contempt of court.
- [Reporter] Vandalism, assaults, bullets in the post.
- We will not go quietly into the night.
Make no mistake about it.
This is a war.
- [Reporter] Kevin Lunney is recovering in hospital,
the PSNI say his injuries are life changing.
- [Sean] What they've done to me is wrong.
I have made plenty of mistakes,
but I think it's important that the Quinns
tells the true story.
[intense music]
Ah, sure.
It's hard to believe that it's your own people
that you've worked for 20, 25 years is doing it to you.
It's just hard to believe.
I mean, it was hard to believe they'd go and try
to take the business off us and put me and my son
out of the business.
And it's soul destroying and it makes no sense.
- [Reporter] 50-year-old Kevin Lunney, who is a director
and chief operating officer with Quinn Industrial Holdings,
was abducted, assaulted and found two hours later.
- For years now, five men have been subjected
to a campaign involving vandalism, sabotage,
bullets in the post, assaults, arson attacks.
- [Speaker] We will want to see the security forces act
and deal with the paymaster who is paying
for these activities and orchestrating
this ongoing campaign of intimidation.
- And then they turnaround now and blame us
for being involved in criminal activity
and abducting Kevin Lunney.
I mean, it's beyond comprehension that your own friends
and your own staff and your own neighbors
would do it to you.
- There are a small number of individuals involved,
paid to carry out these tasks and we need to get
to the crux of it.
We need to get it dealt with.
And it is a law enforcement issue.
And I am not minded to be intimidated
by this sort of activity.
- [Sean] I would accept that the fact
that I have been critical about them and some of the truths
that I have told about them would have created
a toxic climate.
If telling the truth is an incitement to hear truth,
then I'm guilty.
[gentle music]
[gentle music continues]
[gentle music]
My father couldn't read nor write, but he was,
he was quite clever.
And he would count money and he would know
a good animal from a bad animal.
He was able to buy a farm in 1950 for 2,000 pounds
and paid cash for it.
There was no telephones, there was no television.
There was no running water.
We didn't have a car, we didn't have a tractor.
We didn't have anything in those early years.
The four of us was born in there.
Myself and Peter, Miriam, and Bernadette, the two sisters.
- [Bernie] I was the youngest.
I was the baby and spoiled.
He was the second youngest.
He was the worker, the farmer.
Wasn't interested in going on to higher education
or education of any kind.
The sooner he got out and made a few pound
the better for him.
He just didn't turn up for the bus the day
he was supposed to go to transfer exam.
He wasn't going to go that path.
- I hid in the bushes until I seen the bus
leaving the school 'cause I didn't want to do
the 11-plus and didn't do it.
So when I arrived then the teacher,
she wasn't very happy and where was I?
And when I went home, my mother wasn't very happy,
but my father said, leave him alone.
He'll be all right.
He'll help me with the land, he'll be grand.
So I was the dunce that stayed at home milking the cows.
[gentle music]
- Maybe that was the first insight we got,
that he was his own person and was going
to do his own thing.
The rest of us left home.
Peter would've gone to college and would always have been
a kind of academic.
Miriam, similarly.
[gentle music]
- [Sean] I farmed for a few years
along with my father, poorly.
And then we started to get involved a wee bit
in small contracting as well, making roads
for the tractor and trailer and bought a bailer
and used to bail hay for pay.
I felt that farming wasn't for me.
[gentle music]
There's an old saying in farming,
I think it's a true one.
In farming, you live poor and die rich
because the farms worth a lot for after your day,
but you live poor.
So, I formed that opinion very early on,
rightly or wrongly, maybe as it turned out wrongly.
I suppose I was too greedy.
I was just looking for cash, you know,
all the time and farming was too slow for me.
My father took a massive heart attack in 1967.
The week before Christmas, the 18th of December '67,
he died.
It was a serious shock.
- Before Daddy had died, he had sold a field of sand
or gravel, gravel probably.
And I remember Miriam and I had been out talking to Sean
in the front street when he says, you know,
I'm going to start this.
We kinda looked at him, he says,
"Well, look at it's like this,
if Pat Quarry could buy it off my father
and make money off it," he says,
"why couldn't I if I've got my own sand and gravel?"
- Well then there was McCaffrey admitting they started
in the area as well and they were all quite successful
and they were all good people
and they all run good businesses.
And what they used to do is they used to bring
the gravel to the water by a road.
And of course, I decided I'll bring the water to the gravel
and sunk wells, maybe a hundred foot deep.
[gentle music]
I acquired a wee Bedford Lorry.
It cost 1,800 pounds.
The registration number is A-I-L 8023
and that was bought in the spring of 1973.
- And it mushroomed after that.
Mommy would've taken the phone calls at the end of the table
and I would've gone home at weekends and done the books
of whatever he had done for that particular week
and it just started from that very small,
from the kitchen table.
- I think the first year we made 8,000 pounds in profit
and then the second year it doubled and the third year
it doubled and it kept doubling every year for a few years.
While the profits were very low,
it put in place a mechanism that was gonna change my life.
The family were popular in the area,
I mean, we played football.
- If you're looking at the economy of the border region
in the 70s and 80s, it's a wasteland.
He decided to set up a business and locate it
in his own domain.
Quinn routed his business in his locality.
He had a great sense of place.
He understood the area and he was loyal to it.
Whether it was playing Gaelic football,
whether it was supporting local businesses.
He played that card and he played it very well.
[gentle music]
- The redness of the stone that would be very high
in the iron.
So, it's just a wee bit of a tricky.
The whole mountains a wee bit tricky insofar as you have
to pick out different elements from different parts
of the quarry, you know?
My competitors, they were just doing sand and gravel
and I thought we should widen out beyond that.
So we started making blocks and ready mix concrete.
The gravel in our region was very porous and weakened,
a bit soft.
So I had to start and open a quarry then.
[energetic music]
We've been quarrying there now for 40 years.
I opened that in the late 70s.
So, there's still material being drawn from that
up until this day.
I remember going to the bank man in Cavan,
Bank of Ireland.
He says, you're overdrawn in the bank, you know that.
And I said, "Ah, we are wee bit, but sure we're going
the right direction.
Our profits are increasing all the time."
I looked at him and I said,
"I bought a farm of land yesterday."
"You what," he says.
I said, "I bought a farm of land yesterday."
He says, "Who's going to pay for that?"
And I said, "I don't know."
So...
- [Bernie] I suppose we were all frightened
of the expenditure that was involved in it
because it seemed almost an impossible dream.
Mommy's dead 13 years but if she had seen
what was going to happen, she'd say he's going far too fast.
He's doing far too much.
It'll never work out.
Nobody around would ever have thought
that he was making money, you know
because he was just so relaxed about,
he was still very much part of the community.
He was still out in the football field every evening.
[gentle music]
- [Bryan] When I was very small at midnight mass,
it was the custom that you would put a candle in the window
so that if you looked up at the mountain side,
you would see all the houses lit up.
But as the years went by, one by one,
the candles and the lights went out.
That was it and the mountain was in darkness.
There was a constant, constant drain of immigration.
A whole generation that had gone away
because there was simply no work at all.
And an old man said to me, when Sean Quinn was going well,
he said Quinn put the lights back on,
on the mountain side.
- I never saw a mistake to running a business.
I never saw, I never thought it was difficult
running a business.
Always came easy to me.
[energetic music]
'83 we bought the first pub.
With the five children coming along and that,
I suppose I always wanted to see that they
would all have their own.
And I know that in a lot of businesses,
family rows can have a major effect on the business,
second or third generation.
But having four girls as well,
I thought that pubs might suit them better than quarries
or cement factories and stuff like that.
It was never my idea to go round Ireland or England
or whatever it was and open 20, 30, 40, 50 quarries,
because quarries are very hard to manage.
We bought the pub in Dublin.
It was the year of pub, I think in Dublin
at that time in '83.
And then of course we followed up by more,
I think we had 12 pubs in Dublin
over the following 10 years.
And they turned out to be a great success.
- [Simon] Here was the simple businessman
who'd come to Dublin to go and watch GAA games
in Crow Park and see these pubs like the Cat and Cage
and Drumcondra throwing off cash
and the amount of people spending money in these bars.
And he was a very practical businessman.
He said, I need to get in on this.
This is obviously a very good business.
And I think there was an admiration in Dublin
that he was someone to watch.
[energetic music]
- [Sean] Back in the mid 80s, cement was very hard to get
and all of the quarries were on allocation.
So you had to order it a couple of days in advance
and you make it 50 or 60% of what you want,
what you needed to get.
And we were meeting one day in the Longford Arms
in Longford, and we were all talking,
where can we get cement?
And I didn't even know what cement was made of.
And I said to Bertie Hand who was sitting beside me
and I said to Bertie, "What is cement made of Bertie?"
And he says, "It's made of stone and shite."
And I said, "We have stone and shite."
- He built his business through a combination
of guts, gravel, granite, and genius.
- [Denzil] The reputation for the business did spread
throughout the county and it was,
there was very much a presence.
There was very much an awareness.
And Sean Quinn became Quinn.
- Business creates business.
He created an ecosystem that allowed people who would
otherwise not have been able to get a job,
to get a job, to set up businesses because they knew
that the plants and the machineries would turn off
business and revenues to allow them to thrive.
And I think that's why he had such a level of loyalty
from that area.
They had this one thing up in Cavan and Fermanagh.
They had Quinn.
[ground explodes]
- [Reporter] There's a tile factory that produces
5 million tiles per year.
A block making plant where the output
is 8 million blocks per year.
A new cement plant.
This vast empire is owned by one man.
♪ Not like anybody else from here ♪
♪ Not like anybody else
♪ I like you I like you I like you ♪
- Obviously he'd have a lot of these moves made
before we would even know that he was thinking about them.
But I remember he said that, you know,
people were making a lot more money.
They were building better houses,
but there were no leisure facilities for them in the area.
- I got a lot of satisfaction outta building
the Slieve Russell and bringing thousands of people in
every week in and hospitality in a community
that I was born and reared in.
♪ Like anybody else round here
- Just was a whole new aspect to life for us in Derrylin.
You could go in the evening and after work and you could
bring your children, your families.
It was, it was wonderful.
♪ Like anybody else
- '89, we opened the first cement factory,
in '99, we opened the second one.
10 years later.
A new factory made three times the amount,
so we tripled the size.
- [Reporter] Tonight, I'm in the border village
of Ballyconnell in county Cavan.
Behind me, the most modern cement factory in Europe,
which when it goes into production in just a few weeks time
from this quiet corner of Ireland will be capable
of producing almost 40% of the country's total cement needs.
- I can see the cement to some extent,
but a glass factory, that was completely off the radar,
wasn't it?
- We built two glass factories in the space of five,
six years and they cost 600 million.
- [Reporter] Do you put a lot of thought
into your investments before you make your final decision?
Or do you move by instinct a lot at the time?
- Mainly by instinct.
If I see something good and I like it, I buy it.
[ground explodes]
- So he says, "What if we have to make an urgent claim?"
Quinn Direct.
- [Announcer] Providing you with the answers.
- [Gavin] He had this massive fleet of trucks on the road
and he said, "I'm paying a fortune for insurance
on my trucks, I'm just gonna do it myself."
Like building the cement plant,
no experience of insurance,
no experience of financial services.
And he launched insurance company.
- So she goes-
- Quinn Direct was the best company ever I started.
Without any shadow of doubt better than glass,
better than cement, better than anything.
What made Quinn successful was my knowledge
of the industry before I went into it.
I would have three or 400 vehicles around the place
and we were paying a very high premium,
millions of pounds a year of premium.
The problem was very simple.
If somebody is injured, that would go from one desk
to another for two or three year.
We knew that every week, every month,
every year that a claim went on
it got more and more expensive.
So the trick was, you have fast track,
so we call it our fast track,
you would try to get rid that in the first two weeks.
Give them whatever money they're entitled to, move on.
People love that.
And we could reduce the premium significantly.
- When he bought the Cat and Cage pub in Dublin,
he said you would buy the beer from Diageo or from Heineken
or from whoever on credit 30 or 60 or 90 days credit.
And then everyone would come in on Saturday night
and buy their beer and pay you for it, you know.
So the money came in and it's in your bank account
and you have it.
It's really incredible, incredible cash flow business.
Insurance was like that on steroids.
- I mean that's where this sort of small fortune
turned into a big fortune.
- Quinn Direct was making 200 million pounds
a year of profit.
Quinn Direct was making so much profit that the regulator
in writing would've given us, allowed us for the five years
prior to the crash to take out 800 million pounds
of dividends.
It was so profitable.
It was unreal.
- You can see the driving force here at work
and the driving force is greed.
- So I suppose we were making a lot of money
and the question had to be asked was,
"What do we do with this money?"
[gentle music]
- There is a change in Sean Quinn in 2005.
All of the trappings of a billionaire
suddenly start to emerge.
The mansion overlooking the Slieve of Russell,
the private jet, the trophy assets.
- He bought the Belfry for a massive, you know, 130,
I think 135, 136 million pounds.
That was where it started to get a bit,
for me as a business reporter, it was never really clear.
Did Sean Quinn buy this?
Did the Quinn Group buy this?
Did Quinn Insurance buy this?
- And what he wants to do is to create something
unparalleled in Irish business history.
He wants to create a family of billionaires.
- At this point, the five children already owned the group.
They owned the shares in the group,
but these were private investment portfolios that started
to be built up for the children.
There was very little, if anything, in the names
of Sean Quinn and his wife Patricia.
- What he wants to do is to hand over a property portfolio
of a billion Euro, high returning high yield property
to each of his children.
He wanted a 15% yield and to get that, you have to go east.
[eclectic music]
- That was just the beginning of accumulating a really
eclectic portfolio of really valuable properties.
- [Ian] And it's all been announced that the Quinn Group
have bought this, the Quinn group have bought that,
and the Quinn logo, the Q was put up outside
all of these things.
The Quinn Group didn't own any of them.
They were all bought for the family members.
[crowd applauds]
[group chatters]
- Did these boys bring any whiskey with them?
- They did.
[group chatters]
[group laughs]
- Now, he was game before. - Was he?
- [Sean] I'd been a card player for a long number of years
and then I didn't play any cards maybe
for 20, 25 years there.
And then a couple of neighbors that I had great time for,
but they invited me to start to play cards
back about 15 years ago, whatever.
And we play every Tuesday night.
- Any good ones, Jerry?
- A couple of good ones.
- The value hasn't changed.
We started playing for 50 pence games 15 years ago
and we're still playing for 50 pence games.
- The sharp one's coming now.
- Hasn't changed Tony, has it?
- No, nothing, nothing's changed.
- Winning those games are very important to me.
They have to be won.
We have to, being second is no good.
You have to win, you have to win.
You have to win your 50 pence games.
- Good.
- Quinn is fascinating in that he's absolutely brilliant
at making money, but he makes so much money
that I suppose it's what happens to the ultra, ultra rich,
which is that money ceases to have a connection
to the real things that allowed you to make it
in the first place, the real activities.
And it just becomes almost abstract.
And then you just start thinking about how can the money
make money?
- He diverged from his original thinking in the early years,
which was, you know, you work hard
and it wasn't massively about the accumulation of wealth.
It became at some point more conspicuous.
[gentle music]
He seemed to be enjoying the wealth.
The house was one example, this fabulous lakeside house
beside the Slieve Russell.
I think at nearly 15,000 square feet,
seven bedrooms, parking for nine cars, a swimming pool.
It just didn't seem very Sean Quinn.
The family, I mean they didn't live lavish lifestyles.
Kids went to the normal schools everybody goes to,
but he was certainly always pushing for more.
- The company was being run by Liam McCaffrey,
Dara O'Reilly and Kevin Lunney.
And there's no suggestion that they were going to be usurped
for any top position.
But he was in the background hatching that plan to ensure
that his children would be fabulously wealthy on a scale
never seen in Ireland before.
[gentle music]
- Quinn Group was worth 4.3 billion and showed it was making
four, 500 million pounds a year of profit.
Plus the property, which was 70.
Whereabout India, Russian, and Ukraine,
we'd have had 20 properties.
So it was near or 600 billion a year of profits.
2005, there was a few new directors came on board,
you know, when, and they were absolutely in awe
of the sort of profit we were making.
They just couldn't believe this,
that a small company in the middle of nowhere down
in Derrylin could make half a billion a year of profit.
They just couldn't believe it.
So they started asking me, "Sean, what do you intend to do?"
Or what way are you gonna grow this business?
And I said, "Well, I'm a little concerned about growing
the manufacturing business too much
because we could lose control."
If we open too many more factories
Derrylin gonna lose control so I want to be careful there.
And I said, property is one we would like to be involved in.
So what I said was, my thinking was that we would spend
a third of our surplus cash on manufacturing,
a third of it on property outside of Ireland
and a third of it on blue chip companies
in the stock market.
[gentle music]
- Now, Sean Quinn has been playing the stock market
for years back from, you know, the early 80s,
right through the way he's been buying shares,
be it in futures or ammonia stocks, whatever.
2005, he learns about a contract for difference
and something goes, I really like that
because it allowed him to keep his investments secret.
- Well a contract for difference is effectively a bet
on the movement of a share price without you actually having
to own the share.
You put down a deposit roughly 20% usually.
If the share price goes up, I get the full benefit of it.
So you could make a lot of money very quickly
in what was a rising market.
Irish stocks were rising and if the market
is constantly rising and you don't need to put down
the full outlay on the value of the stock to invest in it
and to bet on it, of course you're going to do that.
It's a no-brainer while stocks are rising.
- It's a very complex financial instrument.
It's a crude form of speculative gambling.
But Sean Quinn loved it.
- So Sean Quinn was advised by PwC, you know,
took professional advice and on foot of that advice,
a company was set up to make CFD investments on behalf
of Sean Quinn and the Quinn family.
When he started, you know, there were multiple
Irish companies that he was investing in.
Ryanair, Paddy Power and some of the other banks.
He did CFD trades in FBD, which was a rival insurer
to Quinn Insurance.
Unusual, but not red flag stuff.
When that started really to change was within,
certainly within a year, he began to sell out
of all other CFD positions and put all of his money
into Anglo Irish bank.
- [Simon] When the boom hit, it required
a lot of construction.
Anglo was there to be able to step in and say,
we'll give you a loan, no problem.
It was all about finding yes in a loan application.
- You know, I know of one case,
a guy with a business who wanted to borrow 20 million Euro
and Anglo Irish said, no, we will give you 50.
And he said, oh, I don't want 50.
And they said, well then we don't want the business.
- [Ian] At the time everyone was happy.
The bank was turning off massive profits,
its share price was going stratospheric.
- The profits rose to more than a billion at peak.
It was a bank that was firing on all cylinders,
a bank on steroids.
[gentle music]
[crowd cheers]
- So at a point where I think in 2006 there was,
which is now viewed with some hilarity,
there was a report that Anglo Irish Bank
was the best performing bank in the world.
So a CFD is a bet on a share price and Sean Quinn invested,
I think when the Anglo share price was around 11 Euro
in his first investments.
And it went up to 15 euro.
And I think there's a point where he could have cleared,
I think 200 million Euro on this investment.
But he continued to bet.
[gentle music]
- Sean Quinn looked at the Anglo Irish Bank
and saw something that he recognized in himself.
- I had 33 successive years in Greece in profits.
So I just hopped over a great bank.
I thought they were doing all the right things.
- He saw what started off as an outlier in business,
taking on the establishment.
- And I suppose there was a lot in common with myself
as well, you know.
They were ambitious and they were growing fast.
- He looked at the share price, and said,
God, that has gone only in one direction
for the past 10 years.
- Quinn Group at that point was really at its peak,
you know, peak production, peak employment.
The economy was absolutely flying.
And there was an an itch to be scratched for Sean Quinn
in that there was masses of money in this, in the business.
And he was looking for somewhere to put it.
[gentle music]
- [Ian] If you look at the wonderful logic
to Sean Quinn's business, you start off with gravel
and you say, I'll wash it.
That's a better product.
What do you do with gravel?
Well, you can make cement from it.
Great, we're making cement.
What do we do next?
Well, if we're building all these houses,
why don't we put in some glass into them?
Once we're making the glasses for the houses,
why don't we do bottling factories.
I have all these trucks on the road costing me a fortune
in insurance.
What'll I do?
I'll set up an insurance business.
It was making four, 500 million Euro a year in profits.
There is an argument, and I do believe it,
that the next logical progression for Quinn's business
empire was to go into banking and to try and do in banking
what he had done in all of the other industries to really
try and take on the establishment.
- [Announcer] But like every bubble, the bubble ended
and now were seeing the downside of that bubble.
- [Reporter] Borrowers saturated the US housing market
taking on enormous mortgages in spite
of poor credit history.
- By 2007, you know, things were starting to go wrong
in the global economy.
- [Reporter] The result was that more Americans
began missing their monthly mortgage payments.
The implications could be profound.
- It started with the mortgages in America,
and I just thought it was a temporary thing.
- We had the credit crunch.
So the amount of money available to banks
internationally really started to contract.
The share price of Anglo Irish Bank and other banks
started to fall back.
So, Sean Quinn had invested at 11, 10 or 11 Euro a share
in Anglo Irish Bank had seen them go up to 15 Euro a share
and then the share price started to fall back.
- Once the shares in Anglo started to come down in value,
I thought they were very cheap because the figures were
still extraordinarily strong.
And even in 2008, they were showing a 40 odd percent
increase in profits from 2007.
And the shares were going down to half of what they were.
So I said, this thing has been overdone.
And we took money out of good share,
good companies and me foolishly, I don't,
I'm blaming nobody else.
I took money outta good companies
and put the money into Anglo.
- [Gavin] He had spent this 35 year career building
this really diversified business.
And he effectively took everything that had been generated
by those companies and invested it all secretly
into a bet on Anglo Irish Bank.
[gentle music]
[gentle music continues]
- All of the dough was thrown into Anglo because we thought
that they were going to have the biggest recovery.
That was the plan at the time.
- There's all these rumors swirling around town
that Sean Quinn, the border billionaire,
the 177th richest man in the world,
has quietly been amassing a significant stake
in the Anglo Irish bank.
- Nobody is quite sure of the amount.
There is rumors of 3% of 5%.
And bear in mind that if an investor owns
a direct shareholding of 3% in a company,
they must declare it to the stock market.
They must let the market know their interest
in that particular stock.
- He used loads of different brokers
to buy Anglo CFD shares.
So nobody knew, beyond himself, and one or two people
in Derrylin, Liam McCaffrey and Kevin Lunney,
just how much of the bank he actually owned.
- [Sean] I forget whether we made contact with Anglo
or Anglo made contact with us.
Well, I know we welcomed the meeting because at the time
Anglo shares had started to fall.
I wanted to meet the two men that counted, the chairman
and chief executive to say, "Look,
we're big shareholders here.
We want to know what the story is."
- Sean Fitzpatrick and David Drumm had been in London
the night before in an investor meeting.
One of these great corporate gigs that went on
in Celtic Tiger Ireland where as a guest speaker
they had former Soviet leader, Mikhail Gorbachev speaking.
And from the Gorbachev meeting, they went to meet Sean Quinn
at the Ardboyne Hotel.
- Sean Quinn is flanked by Liam McCaffrey,
his longtime lieutenant and the chief executive
of the Quinn Group.
David Drumm goes with Sean Fitzpatrick, chairman and CEO.
- This share price is going, is falling very, very fast
and we want to know where we are.
Do we sell the shares or is the company going
to be profitable or what's the story?
And they said, Sean, the company never went better.
The company's actually flying, but we're showing 30,
40% increase in profits.
- [Ian] Sean Fitzpatrick and David Drumm
are in salesman mode.
They're not going to go down and say, actually,
we're really worried about our potential exposure
to land banks in Mullingar.
In the back of their mind, they're saying,
we think this guy owns maybe 10, 11,
12% of the bank through CFDs.
So they had factored into their head, it's a hefty stake.
It's not declared to the market.
And it puts him on the hook for an awful lot of money
if the share price goes down.
But it also raises the not unrealistic prospect
that he might be simply making a play for the bank itself.
And then the question comes.
"How much do you own?"
"25%."
- Sean Quinn invested everything that had been generated
into a bet on Anglo Irish Bank.
Only the sort of core group of Sean Quinn,
Kevin Lunney and Dara O'Reilly and Liam McCaffrey
I think had the full picture of what
was being invested and where.
- [Sean] Other people in the office would've known
we shouldn't have been doing it.
I suppose it just sort of happened.
And again, maybe our system was a bit weak
and maybe we didn't have enough people
just looking over this thing.
And maybe I was too dominant a factor in this.
And I suppose when I asked it to be done, it was done.
- When it ultimately came to light
and when it ultimately came to, became public,
it was over 25% of Anglo Irish Bank that was being held
in the CFD products by Sean Quinn, the equivalent
of more than a quarter of the trailing of the bank.
To put that in perspective, if you had owned 29.9%
of the bank, he would've had to make a bid
to buy the bank outright.
- I don't know if the word shocked, right but surprised.
They'd say, "Look at Sean, we're disappointed at the level
of your CFDs and could we get some agreement
that you might dispose of those?"
And I said, surely if you just want me to dispose of those
whenever the share recovers, I'd be more than happy
to do that.
And they seemed happy with that.
And at the time, they seemed genuine in the fact
that the company would grow again
and the share price will recover.
I don't think they were telling me lies.
I think they did believe it.
Diamonds.
[group chatters]
- [Ian] I think there was a feeling from Sean Quinn
that they would be pleased that he was investing
and supporting the bank and supporting its share price.
Oh, it's okay, Sean Quinn, one of the biggest employers
in the country with this amazing manufacturing business
is on our side.
They immediately identified this as a massive problem.
- He goes out.
- Yep.
Stay in Mexico while you still can.
[group laughs]
- But they had to keep him alive 'cause if Sean Quinn
wasn't alive, Anglo was dead.
They also say, stop buying more.
Don't increase it.
This is a big, big play on the bank.
So they go back, they report to the board, say,
"We've told him not to buy anymore."
What does Sean Quinn do?
He buys more.
- [Sean] That was wrong.
I shouldn't have done that.
There's no, there was no excuse for that.
It was stupid to increase it at all, I accept that.
We shouldn't have bought any more shares.
But we bought some more shares, but not very many.
- He really believed everything that had been said and told,
you know, about Anglo Irish Bank.
So when the shares were falling,
he thought the shares are cheaper now,
I'm gonna buy some more.
[group laughs]
I'm not a psychologist, but you know,
classic sort of gambler behavior that maybe we can recoup
some of this.
- I was confident going home that yes,
this bank's going to be successful and this share
is going to recover.
[intense music]
- In the early stages of 2008,
there was this kind of frenzy in the global
financial markets.
Banks were scrambling to get money together.
So investors were looking at, well,
which are the most vulnerable financial institutions.
And on St. Patrick's Day, the market starts turning
its attention to Ireland.
- Welcome to a special St. Patrick's Day 61 News and Sport.
The Irish market was down with bank shares worst hit.
- St. Patrick's Day massacre as it's called,
and share prices of banks all over the world tanked.
[crowd shouts]
- Anglo was in the crosshairs and the investors turned
on Anglo Irish bank.
- What we didn't know at the time publicly was how deep
in the hole Sean Quinn was or how deep
in the hole Anglo was.
That all had yet to play out.
But definitely thought it was the point of no return.
The issue with CFD investment party Sean Quinn was using
was as the share price goes down,
you have to put up money to cover your losses.
The brokers who had sold Sean Quinn then began to make
what's called margin calls.
- As the share price falls, there's an automatic call,
it clocks up on somebody's screen.
You need to get more money off this guy.
- A margin call is the amount that the share price
has gone down.
And because you haven't bought the share,
you have to fund this every single day.
- To cover the losses that you've made,
you need to provide us 50 million, 100 million,
200 million.
- Sean Quinn had money, yeah, he had lots of money,
but you can only fund margin calls outta cash for so long
and within a couple of months he was running shy
of the reservoir of cash.
- One of the most striking figures for me in all of this
to meet the initial cash calls, Sean Quinn,
the Quinn family, the Quinn Group put up 750 million Euro
of actual cash resources from the group
to meet the initial calls.
- One of the most cash rich reserves was the equity
that he had in Quinn Insurance.
Insurance companies are regulated and obliged
to have certain amounts of equity and cash
on their balance sheet.
And so he saw opportunities dip into that to cover
some of those margin calls.
- But you can't do that in a regulated entity.
You can't dip in to the money.
- And all this time, Sean Quinn felt as,
this will get better soon.
- He had dipped into the insurance company.
He had used up whatever personal resources he could,
but at this point he has to go to Anglo Irish Bank
and ask them for money and the bank doesn't have a choice.
- They recognized that there was a major problem here
and the only way to deal with it was to lend more money
to Sean Quinn.
And they took security in some of his properties.
- We've lost 60 million today.
We've lost 20 million today.
We've lost 100 million today and day after day,
Anglo Irish bank would have to give that money over.
- Talking in the order of about 400 million
over the course of March.
Extraordinary sums of money having to be drawn
to make these margin calls.
- Loans began to be made through various Quinn companies
to Sean Quinn in a number that would eventually
amount to 2.8 billion Euro.
- Nobody knows this is going on.
Most of the loans are simply dressed up as working capital
for the Quinn Group or property related lending.
[gentle music]
- [Interviewer] When you started to take money out
of the insurance business in order to to cover the CFDs,
that was the risk that you took with that business.
- That was wrong, I shouldn't have done that.
That was wrong.
That was, I put my hands up completely on that.
- During that period, the bank was working on possibilities
to try and unwind, as they say, Sean Quinn's position
to get an investor in to buy some of the shares.
- The trouble is the news just keeps on getting
worse and worse.
- [Reporter] Lehman Brothers, a 158 year old firm
filed for bankruptcy.
- [Reporter 2] The collapse of Lehman Brothers
triggered turmoil in markets around the globe.
- Sent the financial markets across the world
into a tailspin.
And a lot of focus was on Anglo Irish Bank.
Not so much because it's funding issues,
but because there were questions now around
just how heavily they had lent into the property market.
- The state's looking at this basket case of a bank
and saying, what are we going to do with it?
- So in January, 2009, it was announced the government
was nationalizing Anglo.
- Within the past hour, the government has announced
that Anglo Irish Bank is to be nationalized.
The minister, Brian Lenihan said it would be taken
into full public ownership.
He said unacceptable practices within the bank
had caused it serious damage.
- The shares of Anglo would no longer be
on the stock exchange.
They would be worthless.
- And sitting up in Cavan is Sean Quinn nursing
one of the biggest financial losses in Irish history.
- Sean Quinn didn't bring down Anglo Irish Bank.
Anglo Irish Bank was doomed to fail.
You know, it was a Ponzi scheme, it was gonna collapse.
However, Sean Quinn's not blameless either, you know.
- [Alan] He's not the only businessman who gambled.
A lot of the major property developers gambled.
But there's a difference between that kind of gambling,
which is gambling on your judgment of what's gonna happen
to the market and gambling on contracts for difference
when the share that you're gambling on is tanking
when you continue gambling in it.
It's a mentality that I think
is ultimately self-destructive.
- This gamble on Anglo through CFDs had just gone
spectacularly, like incredibly wrong.
The family owed 2.8 billion,
but they now owed it to the state.
[upbeat music]
- When the government nationalized
and took controlling stakes of all of the banks,
they wanted to put their own people on the boards.
Alan Dukes, a former Fine Gael leader
and a former minister for finance, was appointed
to the board of Anglo Irish Bank.
- One of the things that we made sure we kept
under the spotlight of the board was the situation
of the largest borrowers from the bank.
And you know, Sean Quinn was one of the big ones.
- And he had done for the previous 35, 40 years, I suppose,
turned out to be successful.
And any wee hiccups we had were always ironed out
over a six, 12 month period.
And I didn't see it any different than that.
I didn't see this crash of 2007, 2008.
I didn't see it any different, you know.
- After the management of Anglo, Sean Fitzpatrick
and David Drumm had been cleared out.
- Do you have a message for the taxpayers, Mr. Drumm?
- They needed to bring in bankers to run it.
Mike Ainsley, he was Australian, he was tough
and he had done this sort of work in Australia
and Japan and around the world.
And he came in as the new chief executive
of Anglo Irish Bank.
He needed people who he trusted
and that means he brought in people who he knew.
So he brought in Richard Woodhouse.
The first time Richard Woodhouse goes up to Cavan,
sits down with Sean Quinn and the staff canteen,
it's all fine.
They shake hands, they have a spot of tea,
they have a sandwich.
- I said, "Well what we can do is we'll pay you back
this money reasonably quickly.
We'll have it all paid back in less than 10 years."
Sure everybody knows the Quinn Group's a huge success story.
- And they agree, oh it'll be great, we'll work together.
We'll sort all of this out.
- Oh, he wanted to do a deal, but he wanted to do it
on his terms and he wanted to do it on the basis
of a financial plan that said,
if we would just lend a further 600 million Euro
with him still in control, that the companies
would work themselves out of the problem.
- They weren't very impressed with my attitude.
I certainly wasn't overly impressed with their attitude.
So we didn't gel that well together.
- This was a person who had achieved
some very significant things, but there was a piece of him
that just didn't understand the ramifications
of what he had done.
- It never occurred to us that anybody wrongly,
it never occurred to us that anybody was going to take this
draconian action to try to break up the Quinn Group,
take it away, and destroy it and take it out of my control.
- 2009, the financial regulator are becoming
increasingly worried about Quinn Insurance.
They were worried about the companies reserving,
policies, how much it was putting aside for claims.
But they were also very worried that assets that sat
on the Quinn balance sheet of Quinn Insurance
had been pledged to the Quinn group so that they could
in turn be pledged to Anglo Irish Bank.
'Cause Anglo needed security for all the money
it was handing over.
- We were saying there is no guarantees given.
Guarantees are not given.
Then some, Liam McCaffrey or somebody says,
"Oh, there is guarantees given.
Who gives them?"
"Meself and Kevin Lunney give them.
"How does that happen?"
Mistake.
We know that it was illegal.
He can't be given a guarantee.
He can't be given on a [indistinct].
I said, yeah, we'll have to check that out
we'll have to blah, blah, blah.
- So he says, "What if we have to make an urgent claim?"
"Quinn direct."
- Sean Quinn has a different view,
but certainly the actuaries,
the government, the central bank,
the joint administrators have all come
to a very singular view that the company was chronically
under reserving and as a result was throwing off
massive profits.
But those profits weren't real.
- In 2008, at the height of the crash and at the height
of the share dealings in Anglo,
we'd have 580 million of cash and reserves in Quinn Direct.
Two years later, we had 1.1 billion of cash reserve.
- The regulator came to the conclusion that Quinn Insurance
was not being properly managed.
- Sean Quinn had to be taken out.
- As soon as they put in the administrator,
and we were losing Quinn Direct that did lead
to Quinn Group in trouble because Quinn Direct
was the biggest single contributor
to the profitability of it.
- The administration of Quinn Insurance
affected the resources of the rest of the Quinn Group
and therefore affected the capacity the bank had
to make sure it got repaid what it was owed
from the rest of the Quinn group.
So, the two things, you know were indissolubly linked.
- When you take a brick out of the wall,
the wall becomes very unstable.
[gentle music]
- They took Quinn Insurance from underneath him.
There was this assumption that Quinn will buy his way
out of trouble.
Everyone thought Sean Quinn is going to regain control
of the company until he didn't.
He had his opportunity to go into court and to try
and seek the removal of the joint administrators.
He didn't.
He had the option to put his hand in his pocket
and write a check for a couple hundred million Euro
to shore it up.
He didn't.
So gradually then people began to realize that Sean Quinn
didn't have as much money as one assumed he had.
- He proved to be absolutely opposed to any kind
of restructuring that didn't have him as the center of it.
So it came to the point where we just took the view
that he couldn't be involved.
The reason for the meeting on the 14th of April
was to talk to Sean Quinn about a last chance agreement
we can make.
We had put a proposal to him sometime before that,
which would've left him and his family with a measure
of provision, but it required him definitively to step away
from connection with the company and just let the rest
of us get on with it.
- Oh, he, this is the peculiar part about the whole thing,
is they were saying that, while negotiating
that maybe get back Quinn Direct and Alan Dukes cost,
asked me when I go up to Dublin to meet him
in Anglo's office.
Kevin Lunney and Dara O'Reilly came with me.
- We had no expectation that he was going to agree,
with what we were going to do, but it was agreed
I would put the proposal to him and we will see
what his reaction would be.
- Duke said, "Look, we're taking over the company."
- He's not a very demonstrative man,
but he was obviously shocked.
He didn't say a whole lot very quickly but he then asked,
what were the implications of this?
Were we going to take all of the businesses?
Were we going to take all of the units,
all of the property assets?
To which the answer was yes.
- Duke said they we're taken over the company
and there was people who had gone to Derrylin this morning
as we speak, there's people taking over, Slieve Russell
and Quinn Group, and they're in your head office
and you two men are gone along with,
Sean's gone and you two boys are gone as well.
You're sacked.
Everybody's gone.
- [Interviewer] And what did you do immediately
after that meeting?
- There was a decision made there and then that we would try
to secure the assets that they hadn't loaned money to.
We didn't touch anything they had loaned money to.
Now it was a bad decision, but that's what we decided.
It wasn't my idea to, it wasn't that I wouldn't do it,
I would do it, but I hadn't thought of moving the assets
that were, that they hadn't financed.
Other people who were smarter than I,
they thought of it and I said, "That's a good idea."
So I supported it.
So I'm not trying to blame anybody.
And if I'd thought of it myself,
I'd probably have proposed it, you know, but people were on,
were on the airplanes that evening trying to agree,
individuals that we could move to assets
into different names to keep them safe.
- On the 14th of April, 2011, the receivers
went into the buildings and secured the buildings
of the Quinn businesses in Ireland,
and they weren't coming back.
But, you know, an office block in Russia takes a bit longer
and the ownership is in a particular company and maybe only
Sean Quinn and a handful of people know where exactly
the ownership of that sits.
- [Alan] For us, this was the beginning of the next stage
of the process.
We had finally got to a position we thought where we could
actually control what was going to happen
to the group of companies.
As time went by, we found that that was more
and more problematic.
Particularly for the property assets outside of Ireland.
We knew we were entering the beginning of something new,
but we didn't realize at that stage quite how difficult
it was going to be.
- I mean, it was this whole sequence
of completely unprecedented events.
But that was a really stunning turn of events
for Sean Quinn.
The court cases played out about the ownership
of the Quinn International property group,
and the court came down on the side of IBRC
and decided that yes, the Quinn's had proactively
put a scheme in place to put these properties
beyond the bank.
- [Reporter] Sean Quinn, his son, Sean Jr.
and Peter Darragh Quinn, were subject to court orders.
The bank tried to seize valuable foreign assets.
It found they'd been put beyond the reach of the bank.
- Sean Quinn's a very smart man.
He understood exactly what he was doing.
He chose not to understand.
And there was also an inescapable view from Sean Quinn
that he owned it all, that it was all his, and as a result,
he could do whatever he wanted with it.
So if it meant transferring assets from here to there,
he was happy to do that.
- I think the lengths to which they went to,
to put the property beyond the reach of the banks
were extraordinary.
They were plotting it for quite a while.
Now, it's interesting, you know,
it wasn't particularly well thought out strategy.
It wasn't one that was entirely foolproof
and in terms of the people that they hired to assist him
in that strategy certainly wouldn't have been seen
as being blue chip and the right type of advisors
to do that kind of work.
- [Reporter] Sean Quinn Jr. and his cousin,
Peter Darragh Quinn, were sentenced yesterday
at the high court in Dublin
to three months in jail after being found to be
in contempt of court.
- Contempt of court is used, usually to focus the mind
and it's a threat that doesn't often get invoked.
Sean Quinn Jr. got three months and his cousin Petie Quinn
has never resurfaced in the Republic of Ireland.
Got three months in prison.
And that was a big day.
But the day in November when Sean Quinn Sr was found
also in contempt of court,
was just absolutely extraordinary.
- The former billionaire businessman Sean Quinn
has been jailed for nine weeks for contempt of court.
- We would not have wanted any of that to happen,
but it happened because they set out deliberately
to put assets beyond the reach of the bank,
to which the bank had a perfectly good legal entitlement
as determined time and time again by the courts.
- Look around the border if they felt those guys in Dublin
have wrecked it all for us, and then they're putting
our guy out of business.
It's the financial regulator in Dublin.
It's the media in Dublin, it's the government in Dublin,
and they don't understand what it's like to live
in the country.
- When Elizabeth Dunne said,
we're giving him nine weeks and he has a week
or whatever time he needs to consider it,
what he wants to say or do.
I just stood up in the court, I said,
"I'm going this evening."
I went to the bar along with a couple of friends of mine,
local locals here, and I had two pints of beer
and two or three double brandies
and headed straight for the white van into Mountjoy.
- [Interviewer] What was it like
when that door closed behind you?
- I was drunk.
- [Rodney] You know, you've got this incredible image
of that man sitting in that amazing house
and then that night was sitting in a prison cell.
There was a lot of shock in the area.
A lot of people were wondering what this meant overall
for everything and there was certainly a lot of anger
in the area from his supporters.
So this is Dune Mountain.
This is where over a two year period,
a huge number of attacks took place.
The electoral substations were targeted,
the wind farms were targeted,
and dozens of telegraph poles were cut down and it was all
to cause disruption to all of the factories
on the other side of that mountain.
There were two distinct period of attacks.
They began in the days after the business was taken over,
but developed over the following years.
They were all about preventing the administrators
from selling off the Quinn businesses.
- [Reporter] Quinn Group has new owners
under new name Aventas.
More than 1,100 people are employed by the Aventas Group.
Jobs put at risk by a campaign of attacks.
[intense music]
- [Rodney] The attacks started quite low scale
and then they soon intensified from cutting
electricity wires to setting fire to vehicles,
to crashing cars into sides of buildings.
Part of an ongoing campaign of intimidation
and threats to try to warn off people who are
maybe attempting to buy parts of the business.
- Fundamentally, this community and its employees
are one in the same thing.
I think there's a very narrow minded minority
who are actually conducting these campaigns
of violence and sabotage and intimidation.
- Certainly the heavy-handed approach by an Irish government
selected by the people to win with that heavy hand
into a rural area who had done nothing but good in that area
and take it over and destroy it.
I mean, it was criminal and of course it was going
to raise tensions and of course things were going to happen
and did happen.
Was I part of it?
Absolutely not.
Was I anger, was it done because of my anger?
Was it done because I was telling the truth
about what the position was?
Maybe.
But was I involved in planning it and involved?
Absolutely not.
- The Irish cement market started to liberalize in the 1990s
and as a result both Sean Quinn and Kevin Lagan
looked at building large plants.
There was a bitterness there,
there was a rivalry there that kind of spilled out
when they both started to plant flags
into their public market.
When Quinn got into distress and the business was in peril,
Kevin Lagan was an obvious buyer.
The difficulty obviously was that there was this emnity
in the past.
Lagan was quite determined to try and rescue the business
and rescue the jobs and, you know,
he would've had a lot of good standing with the banks,
good standing.
He was somebody who could, who could easily have stepped
into a lot of those businesses and just changed the name
over the door.
But obviously that was the problem for Quinn.
He didn't want to see anybody's name over the door.
- Kevin Lagan got a parcel in the post and inside
that parcel was a cigar box.
Inside the cigar box was a bullet and a message that said,
"Quinn, is this what you want?"
- If you read between the lines,
do you want to be coming into the lions den
to run the business and to contribute
to making our community non-friendly.
Let's use that word, non-friendly or hostile.
- Really, it was a case that Quinn's supporters
didn't want anybody taking over the business, obviously.
But I'd say Kevin Lagan probably would've been towards
the top of people not to take the business over.
- The whole thing was a mess.
I mean, the whole attacks that happened,
people were pointing the finger at me.
I had no hand, act or part in any attack.
I suppose I played a bit of football and you get a box
in the mouth or you give one or get one and you have
to get on with life.
There's no point in crying about it.
You just get on and move on.
- The intimidation and the violence
basically scared everybody off.
So I think there was a feeling that you weren't gonna get
an outside buyer.
That the buyer for the business would probably have to come
from the inside.
- Something had to be done.
We weren't able to continue to keep the business
and be sold but we had to have an alternative.
We had to have a management buyout.
- There were lots of rumors at the time that there was work
underway to try to come up with a plan that would see
the return of Quinn.
Essentially what was happening was there was a consortium,
a local consortium that were meeting regularly,
trying to thrash out a plan that would see them take control
of the Quinn business and then return Sean Quinn
to that business.
- So John McCartin came to me in 2014, early 2014,
and said that there could be a deal done and that there will
a position to buy the manufacturing business.
And of course that was sweet music to my ears
that this company should go back to where it belonged
and it should come back into the family and the community.
- John McCartin is a Fine Gael councillor at the time
and a businessman.
And he was very well regarded in the border region
but also in business and he was someone
that got on very well with Sean Quinn.
Their families went back years.
John McCartin and Sean Quinn were very close.
- So, I rang Liam McCaffrey and I asked to meet him.
Liam said he would and he arranged to meet
all the directors, past directors of Quinn Group,
and they all met the following night and every single one
of them agreed, you know, that they would throw
their shoulder to the wheel and they would get on board.
- They called it Q-B-R-C, Quinn Business Retention Company.
- Our group between signs and protests and anything
we could do that could deter Paul O'Brien,
who was the receiver, from selling off,
breaking up the businesses and selling them off
to interested parties and Lagan was one of those.
And then there was a company from England interested
in the packaging or pc, a packaging company.
We got word probably from internally, naturally in Quinns.
And they rang me up to say that this was happening
and Paul was going to sell that business.
And that was important.
That was crucial, you know, to the Q-B-R-C package.
And that would have to stay within the group.
It wasn't valuable without that.
And then said that we would have to write them a letter
to persuade them not to pursue their interest.
- The letter worked, the English Packaging Company
immediately pulled out of the deal.
The administrators and the American bondholders
that were still owed over 1 billion Euros
were being frustrated at every attempt
to sell off the business.
But in the spring of 2014, despite the previous threat
to his life, Kevin Lagan come back to the table
to make a bid for Quinn Rooftiles.
But that only made him a target for Quinn supporters again.
And over the course of one weekend,
his businesses north and south were attacked,
causing over a million Euros worth of damage.
Kevin Lagan was initially determined to go through
with the deal for the roof tile factory,
but then another death threat arrived this time
on the morning of his wife's death.
He'd had enough and he pulled out.
For the American bond holders, it was the last straw.
They were still owed over 1.1 billion Euros.
And it was at this point they began to enter negotiations
with Quinn's business allies and former management team,
Q-B-R-C.
So this is the 140 page agreement between Q-B-R-C
and the three American bondholders,
which effectively saw an agreement to set up a new company
which would manage the cement business in this package
of business but what it didn't include
was the glass factory.
The factory, the business that Sean Quinn really wanted
to get his hands on.
What the bondholders and Q-B-R-C agreed in this document
was that if there was no,
what they called community interference,
defined as sabotage, threats and intimidation,
there's a specific clause in the deal,
Q-B-R-C would get a higher percentage from the sale
of the glass business.
You know, there's huge amount of detail
throughout this document and who it never names
is Sean Quinn.
Sean Quinn's name is not in this agreement.
- I suppose the one element that would've been surprise
would've been whether Sean Quinn was involved or not
and how far he would've got.
But that seems to have been slapped down pretty quickly
by the three hedge funds.
They didn't really want to be seen to have Sean Quinn
in direct control and in terms of what that reputationally
would mean for them.
And I think there would've been a lot of questions asked
of them if, because of the whole history.
His retention then as a consultant,
almost like a presidential role,
it would've sat well 'cause that would've meant
that he wasn't in control of the business,
but locally he would've still seemed to have been involved.
- [Reporter] The site has been purchased
by the Quinn Business Retention Company,
which is run by local business owners and supporters
of the former billionaire.
Mr. Quinn was greeted by cheering and clapping
when he visited the premises this morning.
[dramatic music]
- Pictures are on the television of the boys all back in
and Sean Quinn going about with a tray of drinks.
So, we were all delighted and we were all chuffed
and sure it was what we had campaigned for.
- I was there watching a cherry picker go up
onto the side of the building to remove the Aventas sign
and they took it down and they set fire to it.
- We thought at that stage, mission accomplished,
we can take a breather.
But naturally, because of what had happened,
he couldn't be seen to be back in there as boss.
He wasn't CEO.
The CEO was Liam McCaffrey.
- As far as I was concerned, I was completely in control.
I rang Liam and said, "Liam, could I meet you
and have a bit of a chat?"
So I said to him, "Am I the boss here?"
So I had my suspicions, but even after that,
day by day, week by week, you could see
that there was something wrong.
- I don't want to blame him.
- And I feel like all of a sudden
there's nobody reporting to me.
- Sean Quinn has been totally ignored and humiliated.
- I felt I had no choice.
I knew the game was up.
So I said, okay, bye-bye.
Not a penny from Allen Dukes.
Not a penny of redundancy, not a penny from anybody
for anything, nothing.
Just everybody tried to bleed us dry
so we couldn't pursue them.
- When the news came through that he'd left the business,
there was a state of disbelief.
It really was a case of him almost overplaying his hand
once he'd left the business and once he'd left the building,
and it was very hard to see of anyway he could get back in.
- I built that company.
They didn't build that company,
I built that company.
- There was allegations being made all over the place
on both sides.
One saying one thing, the other saying a different thing.
But this time there was something a wee bit more hostile
about it that was very hot and heavy.
- They were trying to give an excuse of why
they would push Sean Quinn out.
That doesn't lead to good relations and people can get
wrong ideas in their head.
- Sean Quinn was out of the business again.
The wind farms and the plastics business
and the glass plant, they were all gone.
For a period of time, there were discussions
between Q-B-R-C and the Quinn family,
but a deal proved impossible.
Violence returned to the border and this time
the very executive team that Sean Quinn had built
became the targets.
- The second phase of attacks began towards the end of 2015.
[dog barks]
This time the targets were the management of the company,
Kevin Lunney, Dara O'Reilly and Liam McCaffrey.
Posters calling them money grabbers and making threats
began to appear on the border.
Here we have the incident of the pig's head
that caused massive controversy here at the time.
A pig's head was left at the home of Kevin Lunney.
It was found by one of his daughters.
It was seen as a very sinister move
and caused much revulsion in the area.
- They have annoyed a lot of people,
the number of farmers across the side of that mountain,
and the number of customers and the number of people
that have issued legal proceedings against
and went to reneging on the deal with the Quinns,
so they have a lot of enemies.
- [Reporter] Father of six, Kevin Lunney was abducted
close to his home in Derrylin in County Fermanaugh.
He was badly beaten before being dumped on the side
of the road in county Cavan.
His attack represented an escalation in the campaign
of intimidation and violence against the executive team
in recent years.
- It was a Tuesday evening, September 17th, 2019.
Mr. Lunney left work sometime after six o'clock
and he was driving up this narrow little country lane
that leads to his home in Derrylin in county Fermanagh.
When he saw the white BMW parked in the lane way
in front of him, and he said immediately as he stopped
this BMW reversed.
Immediately two men emerged from that BMW.
They were both wearing face masks,
their faces were completely covered and they
were wearing black clothing.
These two men approached Mr. Lunney's car and tried
to drag him out of it.
And he said there was a scuffle.
He kicked at them from inside the vehicle.
So it took some time for them to get him out
of the Land Cruiser.
When they got him outside, he realized that there
was another man had arrived in an Audi A4.
Described him as being bigger,
heavier set than the other two.
So this man had a Stanley knife in his hand and he held it
to Mr. Lunney's face.
- Get in there!
Get in!
- [Eoin] He felt the Audi startup and move at speed.
This journey continued for about 40 to 50 minutes.
The boot opened up again and he noticed that he was
in a very overgrown area.
He figured it was a farm yard of some kind, pretty unkempt.
And there were a number of trailers, in particular,
a blue trailer.
Once he was in there, this is when really,
I suppose the abduction has turned into a false imprisonment
now and the assault on Mr. Lunney would begin
inside that trailer.
At that point, his attacker then held him up and told him
so that you'll remember why you're here.
We need to mark you so that you'll remember
why this happened.
They then took bleach and they used a rag to rub bleach
into his legs, into his torso.
That caused an immense amount of pain, he said.
And then they used the bag to rub the bleach
all over his face and head.
They then used a wooden bat to strike Mr. Lunney's shin.
He said that after the first strike,
he knew that his shin had broken,
but then he was struck again almost immediately
in exactly the same place.
They told him that they were gonna leave him at the side
of a road but he was warned, do not look back.
And he was pushed out of the van with his face
facing towards the ditch.
- [Reporter] A board member of Quinn Industrial Holdings
claimed today the attack was carried out by people
who were contracted and paid to do it.
This morning, as part of an ongoing investigation,
Garda made three arrests.
Amid high security, the men were brought
to Virginia Courthouse this morning.
The details of the allegations against the men
cannot be reported at this stage.
Garda here say their investigation is continuing.
- The attack on Kevin changed everything.
It changed people's perception that this attack
they believed at the time was carried out
in support of Quinn.
And I think he has lost a lot of respect in the area
from people who would've previously supported him.
- [Interviewer] Did you have anything to do with the attack
on Kevin Lunney?
- Absolutely nothing.
Absolutely nothing.
Where would I, why would I bother me head with Kevin Lunney?
Just think about why would I bother my head
with Kevin Lunney?
One thing I think that somebody should ask Kevin Lunney,
why was he attacked?
What they have done over the last six, seven years
and the level of betrayal is probably unprecedented
in the history of this state.
Now I have nothing good to say about Kevin Lunney.
I'd like to make a presentation to somebody
who had a major influence on the success of Quinn Direct
over the past 10 years.
Somebody has to have the respect of their colleagues
and that's the important thing in life.
Kevin Lunney always had the respect.
[crowd cheers]
[gentle music]
[gentle music continues]
I don't think that anybody, regardless of what
whether denied, they should have stooped to the level
of what they've done to Kevin Lunney,
that should never have happened.
Human beings don't do that to each other.
But there'll be doubts in people's minds, you know, Jesus,
how come the television crews from all over Ireland
promoting this thing about Sean Quinn,
and he was responsible for the abduction of Kevin Lunney.
People do believe that.
- [Father] I now believe that there has been
a mafia style group, with it's own Godfather
operating in our region for some time and it's serious.
This well planned and well organized abduction
could only have happened if some person
with ulterior motives agreed to pay these criminals
a sum of money and gave instruction of what he required
be to done to an unsuspecting victim.
Some devious people are so consumed with hatred and emnity
that they lose their moral compass and are prepared
to hire the most ruthless of criminals
to achieve their sinister goals.
They also become compulsive liars.
This region deserves better.
This region and its resources belong to all
its hardworking citizens.
[crowd applauds]
- Every morning you get up, it's no different
and it's just this heavy load every morning
and enormous pressure, yeah.
And it translate on to children, I think,
and everybody in the house because everyone is in bad form.
- You know, what they've done to us is unbelievable.
It was hard to believe they'd go and try to take
the business off us.
But now to try to make us criminals being involved
in Kevin Lunney's attack.
Don't worry about the boys that done it.
Get Sean Quinn.
Get the big, get to whoever's paying the money.
[gentle music]
The people have to believe it.
They have to believe that there's something in this.
Surely the priest wouldn't be getting up on the altar
and blaming Sean Quinn if he wasn't involved somewhere.
[gentle music]
[gentle music continues]
- [Gavin] The further distance you take from it,
it becomes this kind of clear cut case of a guy
who over borrowed, made this crazy bet
on a single share of a single bank
and then had to be bailed out by that same bank.
And that's just seen as so toxic.
It's not black and white.
The legacy of the businesses will always be there
for the people who work in them and for their families
and for the local area.
But there's some pretty big missteps that can,
couldn't, can't ever be forgotten.
- [Fintan] For all my criticisms of Sean Quinn,
I think the thing you can't take away from him
is that he put a lot of backbone into communities
that had been abandoned and abused.
Made them feel that they mattered.
And I think the strengths of purpose
that we've been getting
from those border communities over the Brexit crisis
has at least something to do with the legacy of Sean Quinn.
- The words that come to mind when I think of Sean Quinn
are delusion and defiance.
I often felt looking at those children at the beginning
of their adult lives when they were getting married,
having their first babies, for them to have to go through
close to a decade of living under that pressure
in those circumstances.
And for a father to have put them through that
because of his own determination and his own delusion.
And because of some misguided concept of
mafia-like family loyalty,
that to me just strikes me as being sad.
I mean, this at the end of the day is a tragedy, really.
And I don't think there are any winners,
certainly not among the Quinns.
- I think he deserves to be remembered as somebody who
achieved a remarkable economic revitalization
of a very depressed area of the country.
And the footnote will have to be that
the great pity is that he gambled it all away.
- I'm delighted to unveil Mannok as a new brand
of the business moving forward.
This marks a significant step.
It's the roots of where this business has come from
and it's to reflect that in the new name.
[gentle music]
[gentle music continues]
[gentle music]
- All I can say is that in my 75 years,
I never knowingly,
[Sean sobs quietly]
I never knowingly took anything that didn't belong to me.
Never.
[gentle music]
I think my legacy will be that, uh--
I built up a great company.
I employed a lot of people in a very poor area.
I was an honest man
and that the area
would be more successful because of Sean Quinn
than it would be without him.
And that he got rough justice.
- Okay? - [Interviewer] Yep we're done.
[gentle music]
[gentle music continues]
[gentle music]
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[gentle music]
[gentle music continues]
[gentle music ends]