Sean Quinn’s “up-by-the-bootstraps story” was once emblematic of Ireland’s boom, said Doreen Carvajal in The New York Times. But the 65-year-old former billionaire now personifies the Celtic Tiger’s bust. The farmer’s son launched his business in 1973 with a 100-Irish-pound loan for digging a gravel quarry, and grew it into a globe-spanning empire of concrete factories, hotels, and health-care and insurance companies. It all came crashing down thanks to disastrous bets in the run-up to Ireland’s banking collapse. Having filed for bankruptcy last November in Northern Ireland, Quinn claims he’s down to “his last 11,000 euros, an aging Mercedes, and 166 acres of land.”
One of his former creditors claims that’s hogwash, and the dispute has “sparked one of the most expensive and bitter legal battles in Irish history,” said Jamie Smyth in the Financial Times. The financial institution formerly known as the Anglo Irish Bank, which was nationalized in 2009, says Quinn owes it more than $3.5 billion. This week, it got Quinn’s bankruptcy annulled by arguing that he did most of his business in Ireland, not Northern Ireland, where bankruptcy laws are more lenient. The bank says it is determined to recoup taxpayer money from Quinn.
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