IRISH BANK Resolution Corporation – the former Anglo Irish Bank – is trying to establish who is behind a British Virgin Island company that acquired an interest in a Ukrainian shopping centre that had belonged to Seán Quinn’s family.
The company – which acquired the interest before Anglo moved to seize Quinn family assets – is now frustrating attempts by IBRC to take control of the centre in the Ukrainian courts.
The High Court in Belfast is to be asked today to continue a previously unreported injunction granted before Christmas preventing the company, Lyndhurst Development Trading SA, from selling on its interest in an operating firm that runs the Kiev shopping centre while IBRC seeks to establish who owns the offshore entity.
The State-owned bank is involved in mirror proceedings in the British Virgin Islands as it seeks to prevent the shopping centre slipping from its grasp.
The shopping centre produced a rent roll of $10 million in 2010 but the bank has been unable to seize control of the Ukrainian company that receives the rent.
On December 26th, the courts in Kiev granted a $45.2 million judgment in favour of Lyndhurst and against the Ukrainian operating company.
The shopping centre is one of a number of properties bought by Quinn companies in the last decade as part of a programme whereby Mr Quinn sought to provide valuable inheritances for his children.
Loans from Anglo that were used to refinance the purchases, which total hundreds of millions of euro, have not been repaid, but the bank is finding it difficult to seize some of the assets involved. A Quinn family company called Demesne Investments Ltd, with an address in Mr Quinn’s native Derrylin, Co Fermanagh, had an interest in debts due from the operator of the Kiev property but these appear to have been transferred to Lyndhurst, via an intermediary, IBRC told the Belfast courts before Christmas.
A Quinn family spokesman had no comment on the matter yesterday.
In the case in Kiev on December 26th, the judge accepted a submission from the former director of the company that runs the centre, but refused to hear from the director appointed in her place late last year. The Quinn family was not represented at the hearing.
Senior IBRC executive Peter Woodhouse said the Ukrainian court system was acting “as a tool of legalised robbery of foreign investors” and called on the Ukrainian prime minister to intervene.
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