BELFAST, (Reuters) – Ireland’s former richest man, Sean Quinn, was declared bankrupt yesterday after having bet the family fortune on the shares of Ireland’s most notoriously profligate bank just before it collapsed.
Quinn, 64, developed a quarrying operation in the northern county of Fermanagh in 1973 into a global organisation with insurance and property interests. He amassed a fortune of 4 billion euros ($5.4 billion), before investing massively in the now failed Anglo Irish Bank, one of the biggest casualties of Ireland’s property bubble.
“It is with great sadness and regret that I have applied for voluntary bankruptcy in the High Court in Belfast today,” Quinn said in a statement. A court spokesman confirmed the court had declared him bankrupt.
“He doesn’t have any ability to pay his debts at this time,” Quinn’s solicitor, John Gordon, told Ireland’s state broadcaster RTE. “He is left with very minimal assets.”
At the height of the Celtic Tiger property boom in 2008, the Sunday Times rich list named him Ireland’s richest man with a fortune then estimated at 3.73 billion pounds, worth 4.7 billion euros at the time.
Quinn was known for jetting around eastern Europe with a team of lawyers to seal multi-million-euro property deals, but he kept a much lower profile than many of his fellow property tycoons, with few conspicuous displays of wealth.