The former billionaire businessman Seán Quinn snr used a British Virgin Islands company set up in 2007 to buy a half-share in a site in Russia to develop an office and hotel complex as part of his family's overseas property investments.
The offshore company was used several years before Quinn was accused by the former Anglo Irish Bank of using a British Virgin Islands company to put multimillion of euros in assets beyond the reach of the bank.
Lawyers for Anglo Irish, now known as Irish Bank Resolution Corporation (in liquidation), claimed in a high-profile court action in Dublin that a British Virgin Island company called Lyndhurst Development Trading was part of a complex scam carried out by members of the Quinn family to strip assets in the international property group at the expense of the bank.
In August 2007, Mr Quinn and three of his senior executives who ran the Quinn Group for the former billionaire – four years before he lost control of his industrial conglomerate to Anglo – were listed as directors of the Soverint Holdings, which was set up in Tortola, the capital of the British Virgin Islands, the offshore haven.
Details of the Quinn company were among the trove of documents detailing the offshore corporate activities of thousands of individuals obtained by the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists, which is based in Washington DC.
The British Virgin Islands company was part of the family’s international property group and designed by the Quinn Group accountants in conjunction with the family’s advisers, PricewaterhouseCoopers, according to a source intimately familiar with the family’s corporate structures.
PricewaterhouseCoopers, one of the world’s biggest accountancy firms, declined to comment, saying that the firm did not speak publicly about client affairs.
Soverint owned 50 per cent of the Russian property used for the office and hotel development known as Metropolis: the other 50 per cent was owned by a British company called Holmcroft Services.
Both companies were, in turn, owned by one of the Quinn family’s companies in Sweden, Quinn Warehouse Sweden, which was seized by the Swedish bankruptcy receiver nominated by Anglo Irish Bank when the nationalised lender took control of the Quinn family’s businesses in 2011.
Most of the assets in the Quinn’s international property empire were owned by Swedish or Cypriot companies but, in the case of the Metropolis project, unusually a British Virgin Islands company was used.
It is not clear why the property deal was structured in this way.
Company records show that the directors of Soverint were John Ignatius (Seán) Quinn snr, Liam McCaffrey, Kevin Lunney and Dara O'Reilly, all executives within the Quinn Group.
Commonwealth Trust, the British Virgin Islands company formations agent which has set up thousands of companies for customers around the globe, acted as registered agent for the Quinn company. Commonwealth Trust also runs subsidiaries in Belize and the Bahamas.
State-owned IBRC and the Quinn family, previously the bank’s biggest shareholder, are embroiled in litigation over the legality of €2.34 billion of loans due by the family to the lender.
