Kieran Wallace is not known for walking slowly. For much of the past 15 years, the accountant has either been rushing into one meeting, or hurrying out of another.

Technically, his office is on the third floor of KPMG’s industrial style office block, overlooking picturesque St Stephen’s Green in the heart of Dublin city. Wallace, however, is rarely in it; his diary crammed with a never-ending slew of meetings, consultancies and staff updates.

Increasingly, much of his time is now spent overseas, with a variety of companies, state agencies, even governments, seeking to extract some of the knowledge he amassed sifting through the debris of Ireland’s economic ruin. 

In early April, however, Wallace walked deliberately slowly, thoughtfully making his way down the River Liffey to the Four Courts and a meeting that would close both a chapter of Wallace’s career and of Irish corporate life.

Since the day Anglo Irish Bank had installed him as share receiver over the Quinn Group in April 2011, Wallace had become central to a marathon legal battle between the bank and the family of Sean Quinn, the border tycoon who lost €2.3 billion on an ill-fated stake building foray in Anglo itself.

When, two years later, Wallace was appointed special liquidator of Anglo’s successor, the prosaically named Irish Bank Resolution Corporation (IBRC), it became his job to collect the money and to manage the growing volume of litigation between the two sides.

So, for close to a decade, Wallace had been receiving almost daily updates on some element of the case from one lawyer or another; he had travelled the globe, attending board meetings of various Quinn entities, while simultaneously tracking assets the family had sought to put beyond his reach.

In late April, as Wallace made his way to a nondescript meeting room within the courts complex, he knew it was endgame.

So, he walked slowly, settling his thoughts and readying his questions.

The family’s court case against the bank had finally started, eight years after they had first claimed in court that the Anglo loans were unenforceable and the receivership of the sprawling manufacturing empire invalid.

Now, though, having waited for vindication, the family was about to drop everything, and simply walk away with nothing.

Before letting it happen, however, Wallace wanted to make sure it was all genuine. He was hopeful, but not naive. Members of the family had given commitments to courts before; indeed, Quinn and his son Sean Junior had been jailed for breaching court orders in 2012.

Wallace also had several questions he wanted to ask the family about the alleged €500 million asset stripping scheme. After all, part of the wider agreement would involve him dropping the IBRC’s conspiracy case against the family.

So, he wanted to sit down with Sean Quinn’s five children, who were the named parties in the case, along with two of their spouses, Stephen Kelly and Niall McPartland. Both had been central to certain aspects of the litigation.

The meeting was strictly confidential, and until now, has never been disclosed. All present agreed whatever was said could not be used in court in the event the settlement talks collapsed. Wallace was accompanied by a lawyer from McCann Fitzgerald, a blue-chip firm in Dublin who had been working on the case from the beginning.

For two and a half hours, Wallace probed and quizzed and questioned.

The broader agreement had been worked out in advance, but Wallace, a specialist forensic investigator, wanted surety that the family would fulfil its side of the bargain, finally relinquishing claim to any of the international assets that had been core to much of the litigation.

It is also a story of money; how the bank followed a trail of offshore shelf companies in the United Arab Emirates, Belize, Panama and even Brunei to bank accounts in Hong Kong, Singapore, Liechtenstein and Dubai.

They would also make “full disclosure” to the bank. There would be no more surprises; no more curious transactions involving peculiar companies in intriguing jurisdictions.

Members of the family would later shed tears when the deal was announced. But, during the meeting, they were professional, if slightly distant. They had initially been wary that the meeting would be some class of valedictory event for Wallace, a chance for grandstanding.

This had been a bitter, antagonistic affair. At one point in the aftermath of the receivership, Wallace had been advised to accept a security detail such was the level of fierce, at times violent, support for the Quinn family (the family have long denounced any such acts of sabotage or violence).

Yet, the mood in the room was solemn, almost sombre. For members of the family, the two and a half hours felt like a lifetime. When it was over, Wallace gave the green light for the settlement.  

As part of the deal, the IBRC secured €88 million judgements against each of the five children, but they were not enforced. Unlike their parents, they were saved from bankruptcy and allowed to move on with their lives – unless, of course, the deal is broken.

Further judgements were registered for some $133 million in missing rents from the overseas properties and 72 million Russian roubles (€980,000) relating to salaries paid to the Quinn children and some of their families.

In their own statement, the family said they were happy to move on with their lives, thanking their family members, friends and legal teams for their support.

In reality, however, the settlement was a complete surrender, and the story of how IBRC forced that surrender is one of the most intriguing tales of Ireland’s boom, bust and recovery.

It is a story of leverage; how the bank obtained that leverage, and how is then applied that leverage. It is a story of cutting deals with shady figures and shadowy firms, and of secret meetings in Dubai, Milan, Copenhagen, London and Zurich.

It is also a story of money; how the bank followed a trail of offshore shelf companies in the United Arab Emirates, Belize, Panama and even Brunei to bank accounts in Hong Kong, Singapore, Liechtenstein and Dubai.

And like most stories involving Irish life over the last 15 years, it is the story of property.

Only this property is not located in Ireland, or even Europe. No, to really understand how and why the Quinn family ended their case, you must look 8,192 kilometres east of the Cavan-Fermanagh border to a regional capital known as the “City of Pearls”.

Part II: “A family of billionaires”

The city of Hyderabad is in the south east of India, 1,500 kilometres south of Delhi and 570 kilometres north of Bangalore by road.

Historically known as a pearl and diamond trading centre, hence the “City of Pearls” label, it is now a hub for major Indian research manufacturing facilities, financial institutions and multinational tech giants. With an output of $74 billion, Hyderabad is the fifth largest contributor to India’s Gross Domestic Product.

It was here, in a city built on a sloping terrain of grey and pink granite, that IBRC found evidence that would help force the Quinn family to jettison their action against the bank, a claim for damages that had once stood at €4 billion.

Twelve years ago years before, Sean Quinn bought land in the Gachibowli suburb of Hyderabad earmarked for a high-tech office park and hotel. Financed by Quinn’s river of cash from his manufacturing and insurance conglomerate, the land was transformed into a modern campus of large office blocks capable of housing 8,000 workers.

The vision paid off. Christened Q City Hyderabad and branded with the same distinctive Q logo that adorned numerous other Quinn Group factories, offices and lorries, it lured heavy hitters such as Tata Consultancy Services, Amazon and software company Infor.

The purchase was not an outlier for Quinn. Instead, it was part of a plan to develop something both unprecedented and extraordinary in Irish business history – Quinn wanted to create a family of billionaires.

Quinn was already a billionaire himself; wealth created through a combination of guts, gravel, guile and genius. His next plan was to bestow the same status upon his five children.

They were already the shareholders of the group as a result of a corporate restructuring, and except for his youngest child Brenda, all the Quinn children worked in the family business.

Yet there was never a suggestion they were being groomed to lead, nor was there a singular ambition that the children would take over the running of the business.

His three most senior lieutenants, Liam McCaffrey, Kevin Lunney and Dara O’Reilly, came from outside the family. Indeed, there was chatter in the mid noughties of a stock market flotation as a way divesting equity, and Quinn talked openly about handing over equity to staff.

“We were too greedy for too long and we still are too greedy,” Quinn said in a rare speech in 2007. “But the intention would be over the next few years to leverage a lot of the profits towards our management and staff. That’s my final ambition in the business world.”

It was a nice sentiment and it certainly played well with the hometown crowd – the speech was delivered in the Slieve Russell, the hotel Quinn built on land neighbouring his family home.

Behind the scenes, however, Quinn was implementing a plan to ensure his children would be fabulously wealthy. It centred on property, with Quinn’s ultimate ambition to hand over a high yielding billion-euro property portfolio to each of his children.

It was a lofty, audacious plan. But, by the time Quinn announced that he was investing $60 million in India in August 2007, it was starting to take shape.

Quinn was interested only in assets capable of producing high yields, generally in the region of 15 per cent. For such a high return, you need an appetite for high risk; that sort of return was not on offer in Ireland, or across western Europe. So, instead, Quinn looked east, spending €145 million on a hotel in Prague and €40 million on a hotel in Sofia in 2004.

The plan accelerated in 2005, with Quinn installing a new team charged to find, acquire and manage high yielding assets. As reported Citizen Quinn, a book I co-authored with the journalist Gavin Daly, he simply told his team: “Don’t worry about risk.” Instead, he happily routed dividends from the family business towards the buying spree.

Years later, when the liquidator and the receivers were unpicking the portfolio, even they were struck by the vision of it all. He had gone into territories and regions that most investors would baulk at, and he had emerged with a portfolio growing in value and delivering phenomenal returns.

The deals quickly became more striking, with Quinn investing heavily in Ukraine and Russia.  Among the purchases was a €80 million office block in the Ukrainian capital of Kiev and the twenty-storey Kutuzoff Tower in Moscow.  There were logistics centres, warehouses, office blocks and shopping centres.

The Hyderabad investment was to be the first of many in India, with the group stating it expected to make further investments in New Delhi, Mumbai and Bangalore.

For tax reasons, the so-called International Property Group (IPG) was run through a complex structure controlled by a company in Sweden.

If it seemed like a scattergun approach to regions and asset classes, that was because it was. Yet they were all unified by two common traits – all were delivering double-digit returns demanded by Quinn. And crucially, there were high quality assets in super locations.

Years later, when the liquidator and the receivers were unpicking the portfolio, even they were struck by the vision of it all. He had gone into territories and regions that most investors would baulk at, and he had emerged with a portfolio growing in value and delivering phenomenal returns.

Of course, by then, Quinn had lost both his billions and his business on his Anglo gamble, after being forced to provide security over his business and the international portfolio to cover his losses.

And when that corporate coup happened in 2011, these properties on the eastern front became central to the global war between the bank and the family.

“So, you are taking everything,” Quinn asked the bankers in 2011, a day when they called him from Cavan to Dublin while secretly dispatching a battalion of lawyers, accountants and receivers in the other direction to sequester his business. “Well, that will be hard fought.”

Indeed, no one could have predicted just how hard fought it would be. It would take the bank close to eight years to finally wrestle control of the property empire, the international wing of which was valued at €500 million and generating €35 million in annual rental income.

To achieve this, the bank had to defend its security in courtrooms in Russia, Cyprus, Sweden and Ukraine. A bank-appointed receiver was forced to do likewise in India.

In addition, the bank was forced to defend or pursue proceedings in Sweden, Cyprus, the British Virgin Island and Belize in order to stem what it believed was the dissipation of the assets. Actions too were taken in the less exotic locations of Dublin and Belfast.

Slowly, methodically, the bank reclaimed the properties. But it was costly, with the state-owned lender racking up €100 million in legal costs. At last count, some €70 million in rent from the properties remains outstanding.

And, throughout all of this, the asset that was hardest to reclaim was not a shopping centre in Kiev or a tower in Moscow, two cities where asset stripping is a way of life and the rule of law can be interpreted, bought and secured.

No, weeks before the Quinn court action against the bank was due to commence, the bank was still struggling to get control of Q City in Hyderabad.

However, in its attempts to do so, it stumbled across something almost as valuable as the $80 million complex: leverage. 

Part III: “Why always Senat?”

By 2019, the Anglo/IBRC asset hunters were feeling increasingly enthused. Robert Dix, a one-time Olympic sailor and former partner at KPMG, and Paul McGowan, another former senior partner at KPMG, had spent years unpicking the asset stripping scheme and recovering control of the assets.

It was time-consuming and challenging, but progress was being made.

By the start of this year, just one asset remained outside of the bank’s control: Q City in India. Yet progress was being made on that front also, courtesy of new information emerging from both India and Hong Kong.

Dix and McGowan reported back to Kieran Wallace that much of the new detail centred on the clandestine role of Senat Legal, a Dubai law firm that they had long argued in court pleadings was central to the asset stripping endeavour.  

While a separate law firm in Moscow called A&B had helped facilitate the ruse in Russia, it was Senat that the bank believed was the real architect. Crucially, the bank still believed it beneficially controlled the Indian asset on behalf of the family. 

Unlocking Senat’s full role would be tricky. Utilising a global network of shelf companies in secretive locations, Senat and its two principals, Michael Waechter and Willem Smit, had created an opaque structure that facilitated the disappearance of assets, money and even companies.

“Why always Senat?” the bank’s agents would continually ask, each time the Dubai law firm surfaced. “Why is it always Senat?”

When Senat was first approached in 2011 by Petey Quinn, Quinn’s nephew and the man who hatched the plan, it had a slick website offering “international expertise in legal affairs, accounting services and business consulting”.

By the start of 2018, the website was gone and it had changed its name on three occasions – to Cresco FZC in August 2014, Cresco Control FTZ in June 2016 and Yangtze Consulting in April 2017.

The bank had long argued publicly that Senat had been involved in moving the asset. Within weeks of being installed as IBRC liquidator in 2013, Wallace filed an affidavit with the High Court in Dublin asking Senat to be joined to the case against the family.

Evidence was produced that shares in an entity called Mack Soft, an Indian subsidiary that owned the Q City asset, were transferred to an offshore company in the United Arab Emirates called Mecon. The shares were transferred for a pittance. Furthermore, a small number of Mack Soft shares were also transferred to Logvis, a company incorporated in Unterkulm, a small town in Switzerland. 

The new information went way beyond this, and it started to emerge in late 2017 and early 2018. It showed that Senat, or one of its aliases, not only still controlled the asset, but revealed complex financial manoeuvres to mine money through a “cash extraction plan”.

This provided the bank with direct evidence that Mecon, despite protests and denials to courts in Ireland and around the world, had an economic stake in the Indian asset.

Based on this information, Wallace dispatched a team of lawyers to the High Court in January 2018, seeking the appointment of a receiver over any shares held by Mecon or Logvis, and also seeking injunctions against Senat itself.

It was a significant escalation, but Wallace and his team felt they had the ammunition required. It revealed a byzantine structure of companies, bank accounts and corporate vehicles facilitated by international financiers, lawyers and fixers. 

The evidence stemmed from two separate, yet interrelated, sources. The first came from the former British colony of Hong Kong courtesy of a Norwich Pharmacal Order. This is an order compelling an innocent third party to hand over documents or information.

Anglo had long harboured suspicions that a Hong Kong company called Orient Guide Investments held clues to the scheme but could not get behind the facade. However, the company had previously hired a local corporate service provider called Heritage Corporate Services and a local company secretariat form, Gold Kilin.

There was no allegation of wrongdoing against either of these firms; they had merely been hired to do a job. But using the Norwich order, they could be compelled to hand over any information they had in relation to the activities of Orient Guide Investments.

Over in India, information was being procured through the Insolvency Courts. IBRC, through the receiver of the Swedish subsidiary, wanted Mack Soft to be declared insolvent. This would allow it to exercise rights over its assets.

It was being resisted by Mecon, and, as part of the fightback, several other creditors emerged claiming to be owed money. Inadvertently, this provided IBRC with valuable intelligence as it allowed the bank to piece together a money trail.

Combined, the information from Hong Kong and India revealed a string of bogus transactions allowing $15 million in revenue generated by Q City to be redirected away from the liquidated bank – the bank believed some of the transactions to be utterly fraudulent, court papers would later reveal. The bank, in separate legal filings, said the scheme was for the direct benefit of the Quinn family.

The first breakthrough came in relation to Logvis, a minority shareholder in the asset through the 2011 share transfer. Documents provided by Mack Soft during the Indian insolvency proceedings linked Logvis to Senat courtesy of Luigi Radaelli, a businessman and an associate of Michael Waechter.

Further documents showed that Logvis had a sister company in Dubai called Logvis Middle East, which shared the same address as Mecon. The listed email address for this company was owned by Waechter.

This provided the bank with direct evidence that Mecon, despite protests and denials to courts in Ireland and around the world, had an economic stake in the Indian asset.

Using information from the Norwich order, the bank could establish that Orient was purchased by Waechter in 2011. The bank had suspicions about this company because it had been used in relation to Russian assets. Now, it was able to piece together details of various bank transactions as a result of disclosure by Kilin and Heritage.

One bank account with VP Bank (Singapore), a division of a Liechtenstein based bank, opened in 2011 on behalf of Orient. It was established by a Brunei company called Greenland, with Waechter named to operate the account. A Liechtenstein company called Maiiestas was appointed to manage the funds.

Greenland, the mysterious Brunei entity, also opened an account on behalf of Orient with Falcon Private Bank in Singapore, with Waechter again authorised to operate it. A third bank account with the Shanghai based Bank of Communications was also established.

Corporate searches showed that the business of Orient was “undecided” but it was expected to have revenues of $60 million a year.

However, the evidence linking the activities of Senat to the Quinns was threadbare, circumstantial at best. There was still no evidential chain linking the cash extractions back to Quinn family members. Wallace needed to link them directly to the scheme if he could force an end to the hostilities.

Tracking the various threads of the tapestry through Hong Kong, Brunei, Singapore, Switzerland and Liechtenstein, investigators from IBRC uncovered a scheme to extract rents from the Indian asset through six individual transactions.

Court papers show that €12.5 million was transferred to Orient’s Hong Kong account. From there, it went to a company in the United Arab Emirates linked to Senat called Isaad. The stated reason for the funds transfer was the sale of a software licence, but the bank quickly established that Mack Soft had not received any software. Furthermore, why would a property company even need to spend such money on software, it questioned?

Further transactions involved deals between Orient and Minerali Holdings, an Indian company based in New Delhi. Under the terms of this deal, Mack Soft agreed to pay Minerali $1.29 million to find prospective buyers for Q City.

According to court papers, Minerali was represented by Ratan Kapoor, a businessman known to the bank as a long-standing agent and fixer for the Quinn Group and the family itself. Previously based in Ireland, he had provided consulting services in India to the family for many years – including as a consultant for the Cranaghan Foundation, a network of companies uncovered by the bank as part of the asset stripping investigation years previously.

Based on the documents obtained, it emerged that Minerali’s Middle Eastern subsidiary received $700,000 in consultancy fees, while a related company in India received $790,000 from Mack Soft. Kapoor was paid directly $295,000 for consultancy services.

Senat was also receiving money directly, with $200,000 being dispatched from Mack Soft to its lawyer.

Cresco Legal was paid $780,000 from Mack Soft, which according to court papers, was for coordination of international litigation. The bank said it was a Dubai firm and was not authorised to give Indian law advice, highlighting Mack Soft was not even involved in any litigation.

Who was Cresco? According to documents uncovered, it was simply Senat by another name.

“Each of these payments appear clearly to arise out of sham transactions and do not have any apparent benefit for Mack Soft,” according to a filing before the Irish courts by Kieran Wallace, adding that save for the software deal in 2012, all of the others occurred after April 2015, when injunctions were in full force.

“There has been a calculated effort to remove funds from Mack Soft,” Wallace declared, stating it was designed for the benefit of the Quinn family to deprive IBRC of rental income.

All told, some $15 million was diverted through the transactions, some of which were bogus and some fraudulent, Wallace said in court papers.

Senat opposed the application for the receivership and the injunctions in the Irish courts. Later court filings attempted to put distance between the firm and the various transactions and corporate entities. However, the orders were granted.

It was a turning point for Wallace. The receiver over the shares would be able to glean new intelligence about the activities in India, and Waechter and Smit were now subject to the orders of the Irish courts. If they attempted to break them, and were caught, they could be held in contempt.

Having strenuously denied being the mastermind of the scheme, the firm was now firmly in the middle of the battle.

However, the evidence linking the activities of Senat to the Quinns was threadbare, circumstantial at best. There was still no evidential chain linking the cash extractions back to Quinn family members. Wallace needed to link them directly to the scheme if he could force an end to the hostilities.

To get that level of disclosure, Wallace needed information directly from Waechter and Smit. Up until now, they had remained loyal to the Quinn family, steadfast in support of the scheme.

However, with the threat of the injunctions hanging over them, Wallace and his advisers suspected they might just be willing to play ball.

So, IBRC picked up the phone and called Dubai and the offices of what was once Senat Legal. Wallace had his leverage. It was time to cut a deal.

Part IV: “A king without a throne”

To fully understand why the Quinn family brusquely dropped an eight-year battle against a bank it felt had robbed them of a birth right, you must first understand the emotional rationale for pursuing the case against Anglo Irish Bank in the first place.

And to understand that, you must attempt to understand Sean Quinn, and the complex governing dynamic between this patriarchal figure and his offspring. And that is no simple task.

It would be easy to try and understand Quinn through the differing, segmented strands of his life. But, having spoken to scores of people who know Quinn over the last decade, I believe this would be a terrible disservice.

Yes, his construct of nationalism and identity was moulded from a sense of time, place and politics; spanning from the sectarianism and violence that served as a backing track to his formative years in south Fermanagh.

He played Gaelic football, attended mass and employed a largely Catholic workforce. But plenty of others grew up against the backdrop of the Troubles and did not go on to build empires from a sand pit.

Others I have spoken to point to rural heritage, how he was raised on a farm in a heavily impoverished region of an impoverished island.

Sean FitzPatrick, the urbane rugby playing former chairman of Anglo Irish Bank, once described him as a “real 1960s Irishman”. Arguably, Quinn might well take that as a compliment.

Certainly, it would fit rather neatly with the fireside tales Quinn likes to tell, such as his famous claim to be a simple farmer’s son. 

Playing the country cousin appealed to Quinn, allowing him to distance himself from the corporate classes of Dublin that he largely competed with in business. Often, he liked to arrive at a deal at the last moment and settle it with a handshake, particularly if he was buying land in the locality.

Quinn was shaped by all of this, and much more besides. He was tremendously loyal to his region and his family; unlike other tycoons, he lived locally (albeit latterly in a mansion) and refused to join the ranks of the monied tax exiles. He loved his region, and the people there loved him in return.

There were physical manifestations of his success too. Quinn had essentially shaped the areas in his own image: the quarries, the factories, the windfarms. The giant Q was everywhere, spinning in the skies and trucking along the roads

The Cavan Fermanagh border was Quinn country, and Quinn was its undisputed king.

And Quinn changed over the years, metamorphizing and adapting as his wealth grew and grew. In 1986, the writer Colm Toibin met Quinn at his office in Derrlyin when his quarries and factories employed several hundred people. During their meeting, Quinn spoke about investing in oil, aluminium, the Swiss franc, and received two or three calls a day from his broker.

Twenty years later, when Quinn was employing thousands of people and ranked among the wealthiest men in the world, he preferred to talk about playing poker for pennies with his friends in a house with no indoor toilet.

Like most men of power and money, Quinn was aware of his own narrative, and he sought to sculpt it in a shape that suited him. As his wealth grew, his public appearances diminished. The lack of visibility merely added to his mystique as Ireland’s richest man; the border billionaire with the Midas touch.

It played well, but it was over simplistic. Behind the veneer was a man willing to take risks others baulked at, a man of profound ambition and, of course, greed.

There is no denying his ability or his desire or his achievements. The jobs alone are a testament to that. He was one of the outstanding entrepreneurs of his generation. What he achieved was phenomenal; starting in 1972 with IR£100 and a gravelly farm, the Quinn Group accounts for 2006 showed profits of €430 million.

There is a myth nursed by his loyalists that there was a deliberate scheme to rob him of his empire by the establishment, by lesser men trying to make a name. This is a nonsense.

He was, I believe, an industrialist who saw the future before others, and was blessed with a foresight that aided him to corner markets and grow market share.

He took on powerful interests and he won; betting that his ability to make a better product cheaper would ultimately pay off in the long run.

But there was a flip side to this, and that side became more and more apparent as Quinn became more and more successful.

By carefully crafting his own narrative and image, Quinn bought into it. He believed he was invincible, capable of anything. It is a common occurrence for masters of the universe, but few have the sort of fevered grassroots support he enjoyed. It amplified it all. He grew a habit of referring to himself in the third person.

He could be charismatic and taciturn, often at the same time. He could be gruff and stubborn too, particularly if things were not going his way. In the 15 years I have written about Quinn, a recurring theme from people who have worked for him is that he was wonderfully loyal until such time as you disagreed with him.

As the years passed and the success grew, he became entrenched and he stopped listening. Even as his troubles grew, he honestly believed everyone would come around to his way of thinking.

His brother Peter once told a prospective director of the group that Quinn was a gambler, but that he could cover his debts. Like most gamblers, he ultimately could not.

There is a myth nursed by his loyalists that there was a deliberate scheme to rob him of his empire by the establishment, by lesser men trying to make a name. This is a nonsense. Quinn was offered many chances and opportunities to save his business.

The state really had little interest in taking over his insurance business. It made for a fine scalp amid the financial crisis, but he was offered numerous chances to cut a cheque and shore up the company’s reserves.

He declined, repeatedly. It would later emerge that the company was chronically under provisioning for future claims, and had a burgeoning €1 billion black hole in its finances.

Before the banks were considering commandeering the rest of the Quinn Group, he was offered a deal that would have allowed him to maintain effective control of his business. Suffering under a €1.3 billion debt mountain, the group’s bondholders and lenders were willing to write off €550 million if Quinn would pay a higher rate of interest and cede a portion of equity.

Under the deal, prepared by the Murdoch McKilliop, a wily Scottish trouble-shooter dispatched to the border to help run the businesses by the lenders, Quinn would have resumed full ownership if things went well. Quinn point blank rejected the deal.

It was this decision that led to the receivership of the group. The syndicate of international banks and bondholders wanted to deal with Quinn. When he refused to engage, they turned to Anglo instead. The rest is history.

There was a pattern – he reneged on commitments not to take money out of the group back in 2009, channelling cash to fund interest payments on his trophy purchase of the Belfry. The €6 million pay-out became known to lenders as “Sean Quinn’s green fees”. There are numerous other examples of Quinn refusing to countenance any questions to his authority.

It was a familiar tale when, after losing everything, he returned as a consultant to a wing of his former conglomerate bought back his former senior staff. Within a year, relations had soured, with Quinn becoming determined to gain more control and more equity. The group’s backers in 2016 accused him of driving a wedge between management. Within months, he was gone.

He refused to accept anyone’s authority. In a court case involving former Anglo bankers, Liam McCaffrey once said that he, as chief executive of the group, sat above all the various divisions. Quinn, however, sat firmly above him.

Yet, up until the claim of undue influence, there was never a split or division with the group. “The Quinns are the Quinns,” Sean Quinn would regularly say.

It was the same for his family. The children may have owned the group, but they were not the boss. Quinn was. It would later emerge that they signed away security in their shares after only reading the first page of the documents having been told to do so. Court paper would later reveal they signed hundreds of documents in a similar manner.

The international property plan was for their benefit. Yet they had no say in where to invest. They lived in the shadow of Quinn’s greatness; above most of the rank and file staff members but below Quinn and his senior staff. His brother Peter was a close adviser; so too David Mackey, a former Cavan county manager.

Board members appointed in an effort to improve corporate governance found it striking for a family business to have so little direction from other members of the family.

Years after the collapse, when the case was finally poised to begin, the family argued in court that they were under undue influence from their father. By then, it was too late, and the claim was thrown out. But it gives a sense of the way the family operated.

Yet, up until the claim of undue influence, there was never a split or division with the group. “The Quinns are the Quinns,” Sean Quinn would regularly say.

The decision to sanction the asset stripping scheme, and the subsequent decision to tackle Anglo through myriad courtrooms, fits within the pattern of a man refusing to accept any wrongdoing on his part and a family determined to maintain the legacy of the Quinn name; determined to prove they were their father’s children. 

To protect his legacy, they effectively lost close to a decade of their own lives. They were consumed by a battle that was largely not of their own making, even if it did have profound consequences for their future.

This family tragedy was Shakespearian in construct, with Quinn continuing to stalk the stage like a threatening apparition. There is no linear narrative, just threads of hubris and pathos.

Sean Quinn was, and remains, a dominant figure in his family and his region. But the empire is gone. He is a king without a throne.

Part V: “Talks, travels, travails… and death”

The secret to reaching an entente with individuals you simply do not trust is to plan for the worst. So, for much of 2018, as Kieran Wallace and his team sought to convince Michael Waechter and Willem Smit to abandon their loyalty to the Quinn family, he was determined to keep the pressure on.

The initial approach to Senat Legal had gone well, but Waechter and Smit could be elusive and had shown a habit in legal proceedings of delays and obfuscation.

Yes, they had hinted they were prepared to cut a deal. But Wallace, Dix and McGowan needed to know if they had intelligence that could link the Quinn family explicitly to various money trails. Plus, they needed to know what it would cost them.

After all, men like Waechter and Smit are hired guns. Back in 2011, they once likened their firm to a Swiss watch, with dozens of little elements working seamlessly to provide the “customer with exact precision and reliable work”.

Now, Wallace needed to see they could deliver him with what he needed. A series of meetings took place throughout the year; all were secret, and the locations moved and shifted. Their existence has never been reported before now.

One took place in Dubai. Another in the Italian city of Milan. There were further meetings in Copenhagen and Zurich. Three separate meetings took place in London between March and December of that year.

Slowly, surely, the broad parameters of a deal came together. The two Dubai fixers would hand over intelligence in relation to the proceeds of the rental income, along with their involvement with the Quinn family.

In return, they would receive financial payment and would no longer be party to the various court actions. The idea was to develop a global settlement agreement that would end Senat’s involvement in the various international fights between the bank and the Quinn family.

The talks, however, came against a backdrop of intransigence by Waechter and Smit to the ongoing litigation in Ireland.

The High Court had appointed a receiver over Mack Soft following the January application by Wallace. Mecon, the major shareholder that the bank claimed was controlled by Senat, had objected to the process. Furthermore, the bank was discovering a string of vexatious challenges to the bank’s security in India.

It also noticed what it believed ere “baseless criminal allegations” against the receiver of the shares and against Robert Dix, court papers would later reveal. One claimant against the former KPMG partner effectively stopped him from travelling to India as part of the effort to take back control of Q-City.

The allegations against him were backed by forged documents, submitted in evidence in court by Smit. Dix said the other side had “orchestrated criminal proceedings against me personally in respect of the forgery, which I strenuously reject.” Similar allegations were made against others, who also refrained from travelling to India until the matter had been resolved.

Mecon also alleged that the receiver over the Mack Soft shares had “hatched a criminal conspiracy” to “impersonate himself” as a shareholder of Mack Soft, further alleging that the “misrepresenting and impersonation is being done with the deliberate and mala fide intention of cheating”. IBRC said there was no basis to the allegation, which it argued was a challenge to the authority of the Irish courts.

The attempts by Mecon and Senat to stymie the jurisdiction of the Irish courts did not end there. In May 2018, Senat and Mecon issued proceedings in the District Court in India seeking to prevent the Irish appointed receiver from holding an extraordinary general meeting to help seize control of the Hyderabad asset.

Documents obtained from the Indian courts give a flavour of the argumentation: “The order of the Irish High Court is nothing but a piece of paper in India unless approved by an Indian court and any receiver acting on such an order is nothing out [sic] but an imposter.”

In the end, the Indian courts felt otherwise stating that Mecon “approached the court with unclean hands by suppression of material facts and documents”.

This was not the end: Mecon attempted to disrupt the EGM itself. Minutes from the meeting, obtained by The Currency, note that representatives of Mecon said that the “Irish court orders are not binding”. Sabir Parvez, who was representing Mecon at the meeting, called the police and made a formal criminal complaint against the receiver.  

“Mecon,” said IBRC in a subsequent court filing, had not only sought to disregard the court order but had “sought to intimidate an officer of the court by launching false and contrived criminal proceedings”.

Over the course of April, May and June, lawyers from the Dublin office of McCann Fitzgerald dispatched numerous letters to Mecon and Senat detailing alleged breaches of the High Court orders, and warning that they were actively seeking to frustrate the efficacy of the Irish courts.

Throughout all this, the back-channel talks continued, with Wallace and his team travelling the world, meeting with Waechter and Smit in an effort to reach a deal that would see the Dubai firm change sides.

However, by October, the IBRC decided that enough was enough, and decreed to escalate matters. It felt that it had enough evidence proving that Mecon and the two lawyers were simply ignoring the orders of the Irish courts. The bank make a decision to increase the pressure on the other side.

In an ex parte application to the court in early November, it sought a series of motions and order that Waechter and Smit had not seen coming, and which would change the nature of the negotiations.

It asked the courts to sequester the assets of Mecon, Senat (and the various entities that it had changed its name to) and make an attachment and committal order against Waechter and Smit for contempt of court.

If implemented, this would have led to a bench warrant for their arrest and imprisonment.

The deal was agreed in principle in early December, just months before the main court action against the Quinns was set to begin. Then, word started to filter through from Dubai that could potentially change everything.

It also sought an order striking out Mecon’s defence, and further motions ordering the two lawyers to transfer the shares held in Mecon and Logvis to the receiver appointed over Mack Soft.

It was a bold move, particularly with negotiations between the two sides at a delicate point. But IBRC believed that it needed to apply pressure to force a deal.

It worked. Within weeks, Senat turned sides and the foundation for a global settlement agreement was reached.

Senat would hand over information against the Quinns, including details of the money trail and further evidence of asset stripping and cash extractions involving a large number of offshore corporate entities. In return, the various actions against them would be dropped, with IBRC making a small payment towards them.

For Waechter and Smit, this was important; a strand of the deal that allowed them to save face.

The deal was agreed in principle in early December, just months before the main court action against the Quinns was set to begin.

Then, word started to filter through from Dubai that could potentially change everything.

Willem Smit, the Dutch lawyer who had agreed to turn side and give evidence for the bank, had died after a massive heart attack.

Part VI: Endgame

Willem Smit was born and raised in The Hague, the seat of the Dutch parliament and the International Criminal Court. An attorney, he built a legal practice in his home city over 25 years, employing 25 lawyers, while becoming a fixture on the legal conference circuit.

However, after three visits to Dubai in 2010, he left it all behind and relocated to the Gulf state. His children were in college, and his wife, a psychologist, remained at home managing her practice. 

“Dubai is only a five-hour flight away, I come back to Holland every six weeks, I never miss an important event,” he told a trade publication in 2017.

The quote appeared under the headline: “Have you ever wanted to leave everything behind and start fresh somewhere else?  Look no further and meet Willem Smit.”

His Dubai business partner Michael Waechter trained as a financial adviser in Switzerland, and wore sharp suits and a toothy smile. Together, they facilitated international businesses doing commerce in the region; part lawyers, part financial advisers, part fixers.

As the company changed its name, so too did its description. By 2016, while trading as Cresco Holding, a name derived from the Latin phrase for expansion, it claimed to be a “privately held dynamic and diversified UAE-based holding with a selective investment portfolio”.

Citing its corporate values on its website, at Cresco said it operated with the “highest levels of transparency, compliance and ethical standards”.

In late 2018, however, Waechter and Smit had agreed to change sides, switching from the Quinns to IBRC. They would receive a small payment for their efforts (and their intelligence), but crucially, the endless Quinn-related litigation would end. It was a pragmatic decision.

And, then Smit, broad shouldered and with a healthy pallor, had a massive heart attack and died. After his death, Naveen Indrakanti, a long-term member of the firm, took over as managing director of Cresco Legal UAE.  Documents show that Indrakanti is a lawyer registered with the bar association in Hyderabad, India, home of Q City.

For Kieran Wallace and his team of advisers back in Dublin, it represented the latest set-back in their efforts to secure control of Q City and end the Quinn court cases. But following a series of meetings, and calls with Waechter, it was agreed that the settlement could proceed.

It would just take longer to arrange. Information would still be supplied; but issues remained in relation to information Smit was due to put in affidavit, and other legacy issues relating to his role knitting various fibres of the global litigation.  

Word started to filter back to the Quinn family that a deal was in train between Senat and IBRC. They were not sure what Senat had agreed or what information had been disclosed. But they decided to proceed with the court action nonetheless.

Delayed repeatedly for years by related criminal litigation involving Anglo and its former management, the family was determined to have their day in court.

Three previous attempts at settlement talks had failed. In reality, none of the three had even come close. During one meeting at a five star Dublin hotel, Quinn removed his shoes and walked around the room in his socks. For reasons completely unrelated to his attire, the talks lasted a matter of minutes. There was no bridge between the two sides.

In 2012, they had secured a preliminary win when the court refused IBRC’s pre-trial bid to stop them pursuing the claim that the lending was illegal and unenforceable. However, the Supreme Court had overruled that in 2015. Following that, the family was offered €20 million in various assets to end the battle. They refused.

That was then, this was now. Their long-time advisers were on the cusp of changing sides. The vast bulk of the €500 million global property portfolio had been reclaimed, building by building. They also knew that IBRC was closing in on control of Q City, a move that would reduce the family’s ability to negotiate any meaningful deal with the bank.

Pre-trial negotiations collapsed also. The family fought on, though. Although, as the case began, it was immediately obvious they were preparing to fight on a different flank. 

In his opening statement, barrister Bernard Dunleavy said the children were now claiming undue influence by their father in relation to the colossal borrowings.

It was, at least publically, the first time that the family had shown any signs of fracture. But it was quickly rebuffed by IBRC.

“Why are they only claiming this now?” one IBRC adviser asked the legal team. “Have they not had seven years to prepare for the case?”

“I don’t want to interrupt him,” said IBRC barrister Paul Gallagher as he interrupted Dunleavy to address Judge Garrett Simons. “None of this is in the witness statement.”

On March 22, the legal team for the Quinn family applied to amend their evidence and to be allowed claim undue influence.

The trouble for the family was that the new claim was at odds with their witness statements, a core element of their action. Reference was quickly made to how Brenda, the youngest Quinn child, had stopped a bus on the way back from a college football match in Clare to sign documents, before facing them back to Derrylin.

The judge ruled there was no suggestion that Brenda was “not acting autonomously or that her free will was overborne”. Rejecting the application, he said the claim against Quinn senior came only at the “13th hour”.

Immediately following the ruling, lawyers for the Quinns said settlement talks were again ongoing. The rejection of the application to amend the claim was a damning, if not unexpected, blow to the case.

“Why are they only claiming this now?” one IBRC adviser asked the legal team. “Have they not had seven years to prepare for the case?”

As the legal team milled in the corridors of the Four Courts, no one was able to answer the question.

In the background, however, IBRC had another card to play. The deal will Waechter and Senat had been ratified. As the court action in Ireland slowly unfolded, the Indian courts had been notified of a “settlement between the litigating parties”.

The Supreme Court had terminated the insolvency proceedings against Mack Soft Tech, the Indian company at the centre of the Q City saga. Under the deal, the control of Mack Soft passed to a new board, with Paul McGowan appointed as a director. It was a victory for the bank and its team, McGowan included.

With the Supreme Court approving the global settlement, the liquidator appointed over Mack Soft was removed and a new Irish-led board has been put in place. New management was now in charge.

People had gotten used to the fact that the businesses were not owned by Quinn any longer; neither the manufacturing plants nor the factories or the quarries, and especially not the insurance company. The world had moved on.

“We welcome the Supreme Court’s decision to take Mack Soft out of insolvency. The resolution will now help us focus more on Q City and improve the quality of tenant experience,” said Paul McGowan in a statement to the Indian press.

The bank has finally secured the asset, although it was a complicated retrieval. The bank was not in physical possession, but a board appointed by it was.

The bank had also secured information from Waechter, which it was preparing to use against the Quinns. So, as the settlement talks back in Dublin progressed, the bank was also drafting up a new affidavit that it was prepared to lodge in court in relation to the conspiracy proceedings.

The document contained a raft of previously unknown details about the extent of the asset stripping and its beneficiaries. The affidavit was drafted and signed, and some of the contents were leaked back to the Quinn family.

For the previous seven years, their life had been a tangled maze of litigation. Now though, the end was nearing.

They were now being attacked on two fronts, the court case against the bank was going badly – the application had failed and Brenda was due to start giving evidence. Within days, in a separate courtroom, they were preparing to field more allegations in relation to the alleged asset stripping conspiracy.

They had also moved on with their lives. Indeed, their father was back in business, operating an online betting portal regulated from Malta. There had been deaths, births, marriages.

Along the border of Cavan and Fermanagh, the heartland of the old Quinn empire, there was support and sympathy for the family, but the feeling was a world removed from the visceral anger of 2011 and 2012 when the group was seized, and Quinn was jailed.

Back then, Quinn had become a rallying point for dissent, generating a huge reservoir of local and national support. There were rallies and vigils supporting their local chieftain and his family; once in Ballyconnell, a town with just 1,000 inhabitants, some 5,000 people gathered to support the Quinn.

Time had dissipated the anger. The Ireland of 2019 was a different place to that of eight years before, where austerity had brewed anti-establishment anger. People had also gotten used to the fact that the businesses were not owned by Quinn any longer; neither the manufacturing plants nor the factories or the quarries, and especially not the insurance company. The world had moved on.

And the five children of Sean and Breda Quinn were ready to move on also.

Just as Waechter and Smit knew it was time to sit down and cut a deal a year before, so too did the Quinn family.

But they would have to do so on the banks’ terms. There would be no payment. They would not reclaim any of the disputed assets. Even the Slieve Russell would remain within the bank’s control.

Sean Quinn senior would also sign the agreement.

The terms were made clear: in return for not bankrupting the children, the bank wanted full disclosure. And Wallace, the accountant who had spent years embroiled in the battle, wanted a chance to look the family directly in the eye and ask the questions he always wanted to ask.

So in early April, Wallace, a man not known for walking slowly, walked deliberately slowly, thoughtfully making his way down the River Liffey to the Four Courts and a meeting that would close both a chapter of his career and of Irish corporate life.

Eight years on, the bank had leveraged full disclosure.