The High Court has found Sean Quinn, Peter Darragh Quinn and Sean Quinn Junior guilty of contempt of court over transactions designed to move assets from the Quinn international property group beyond the reach of Anglo Irish Bank.
The findings arose from injunctions first granted in June 2011 and continued by consent in July. Those orders restrained members of the Quinn family and others from transferring assets or undermining Anglo’s security over an international property portfolio.
Ms Justice Dunne found beyond reasonable doubt that all three men were involved in an attempted US$500,000 payment from Ukrainian company Quinn Properties Ukraine to its former general director. The judge rejected their accounts of events surrounding a 30 August 2011 meeting in Kiev and found that documents had been fabricated or falsified to facilitate the transfer.
Separate findings concerned Finansstroy, a Russian company owning a property valued at US$143.25 million. Anglo alleged that loans worth about US$163 million were assigned for nominal consideration to Belize company Galfis after the injunctions and documents were deliberately backdated to April 2011.
The court accepted that case. It rejected evidence from Sean Quinn and Peter Quinn that the loans had instead been assigned earlier to Russian individual Iaroslav Gurniak, whom the judge described as an unlikely recipient of such valuable assets. Both men were found in breach of the injunctions.
The court reached a similar conclusion concerning a US$44.2 million debt owed by Ukrainian company Univermag. It found that purported April 2011 assignments were actually executed after the court orders and that Peter Quinn later signed documents transferring the debt through Lyndhurst Development Trading.
Ms Justice Dunne described the evidence of the respondents as evasive and, in important respects, untruthful. She found the transactions formed part of a plan to place assets beyond Anglo’s reach.
The judgment establishes contempt but does not impose punishment. The judge said she would hear further submissions on what steps should follow.