Former billionaire Seán Quinn has claimed that he does not have “the price of a bag of spuds” and again denied having any role in the abduction and torture of his former friend and colleague Kevin Lunney.
Mr Lunney was taken from his home in Co Fermanagh in September 2019 and later found injured in Co Cavan. Three men were found guilty in 2021 of falsely imprisoning and intentionally causing harm to Mr Lunney and jailed for periods of between 18 and 30 years.
In a a radio interview on Monday, Mr Quinn said Mr Lunney was made a “scapegoat” during the downfall of Quinn Industrial Holdings and that his kidnapping was a “disgrace”.
When asked if he was the unknown “paymaster” behind Mr Lunney’s abduction, Mr Quinn said that his former friend and colleague “knows well that I had no hand, act or part” in the assault.
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“I haven’t the price of a bag of spuds. How would I be the paymaster?” said Mr Quinn.
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Speaking to Newstalk’s The Hard Shoulder, Mr Quinn said that Mr Lunney was “very unpopular” because he was the “servant” of those who had taken over the Quinn group.
“If Seán Quinn wanted somebody to be kidnapped, something that would never cross my mind… it certainly wouldn’t be Kevin Lunney,” he said.
“It would be people at a higher level than Kevin Lunney. I wouldn’t be in favour of anyone [being] beaten up. I told you already it was a barbaric act. That’s on the record. What I’m saying is Kevin Lunney and I were quite good friends. It wasn’t his idea to take over the Quinn Group and throw me out.”
Mr Quinn said that he knew Cyril McGuinness, also known as Dublin Jimmy, who died during a police raid of his home in Derbyshire, England, in 2019. He is believed to have arranged the logistics and directed the gang who abducted and tortured Mr Lunney.
“I knew Dublin Jimmy yeah, but I wouldn’t have known him well at all,” he said. “I was never talking to Dublin Jimmy for 10 per cent of what I was talking to you.”
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Promoting his new autobiography, Seán Quinn In My Own Words, Mr Quinn acknowledged that he was the “main culprit” in buying shares in Anglo Irish Bank, adding that he thought that the now-defunct bank was “the bees knees”.
In 2012, during a legal dispute with Irish Bank Resolution Corporation (IBRC), the former Anglo Irish Bank, Mr Quinn was jailed for nine weeks for contempt of court.
IBRC alleged that members of the Quinn family attempted to strip assets from their firms and put them beyond the reach of the bank, in defiance of a court order. The court ruled that Mr Quinn, his son Seán Quinn jnr and his nephew Peter Quinn were in contempt of that order.
Mr Quinn said the assets in question “were taken from us illegally”.
“If someone is taking the last cow from your briar illegally, you would do everything in your power to avoid that. Any of the assets in the Quinn Group, like the hotels or pubs or glass factories or cement factories, we never tried to touch any of those assets.
“We only touched assets that were taken from us illegally.”
