Derek Quinlan walked into the Rolls Building in London at ten o’clock in the morning on Wednesday.

The building, curvaceous and stretching to 11 storeys, is within a 20-minute walk of three of London’s finest hotels: Claridge’s, the Connaught, and the Berkeley.

Quinlan, the son of an Irish army officer and a former tax official, had once co-owned the three luxury hotels after beating off a rival offer from a Saudi prince.

A car park on Audley Street in Mayfair is a few minutes further away. Ripe for redevelopment, it too was owned for a period by Quinlan. Close by is 40 Charles Street in Mayfair, one of Quinlan’s former houses. The property is 10,000 sq ft and contains eight-bedroom suites and a cinema. The home is a short walk away from the Knightsbridge Estate, a 3.4-acre prime site beside Harrods. Quinlan once owned a quarter of it.

The list of disparate assets formerly owned by Quinlan goes on. One thing they have in common is that they are all super-premium.

The other thing is everything is sold.

It is 11.27 am, and Derek Quinlan, in the Rolls Building, files for bankruptcy.

Minutes later, Quinlan walks out onto Fetter Lane and melts into the crowds of London.   

*****   

August 16, 2009. Brian Carey publishes a story in The Sunday Times headlined: “Swiss move for Quinlan as loans mount.” The story reported that Derek Quinlan had moved to Switzerland for “tax and personal” reasons. Quinlan moved to Switzerland in July, and he was living in rented accommodation. The story didn’t go down well at home in Ireland. The then Minister for Finance Brian Lenihan was challenged on Quinlan’s move by broadcaster Matt Cooper on Today FM. 

Lenihan was careful to say he didn’t know Quinlan’s personal position, but he said there were mutual enforcement procedures between Ireland and Switzerland. “That is what enforcement is all about and if the taxpayer is to get value for money these people have to be pursued there is no option in that,” Lenihan said. 

Quinlan was now firmly in the state’s crosshairs.

There was context to the comments. Ireland’s banking system, and its economy, was crashing down. Developers had become lightning rods for public anger, and for a political class eager to shift the blame away from themselves.

Quinlan went to Switzerland for pragmatic reasons. He had taken advice from a big four accountancy firm, which told him the only way he had a hope of repaying his banks was to relocate to a low tax regime to ensure he didn’t get hit with a big capital gains bill as he sold off assets to repay his debts.

In November 2009, the journalist Ronald Quinlan doorstepped Derek Quinlan in Epalinges, a hamlet outside Lausanne. This placed him back in the spotlight. 

On December 21, 2009, the state’s National Asset Management Agency (Nama) began operations. The legislation that established the state’s bad bank made it clear Nama was tasked to “resolve the problems created by the financial crisis in an expeditious and efficient manner and achieve a recovery in the economy”.

The state was basically saying do what it takes to get as much money back as possible. If that included breaking individuals or companies to get them to comply, then so be it. 

And so, from 2010 on, Quinlan was living with the ever-present prospect of bankruptcy. In March 2010, the law firm McCann FitzGerald, acting on behalf of Anglo Irish Bank, had prepared a secret report detailing “enforcement options” against Quinlan. It centred on bankrupting him. The prestigious law firm considered the Lugano Convention, which governs the recognition of judgments between Ireland and Switzerland, and concluded the bank could pursue Quinlan in Switzerland, and bankrupt him if required. 

Nama was now four months old, and it made it clear it planned to take over all of Quinlan’s loans. This took the decision away from Anglo and the rest of the Irish banks as to what to do about Quinlan. 

Quinlan’s loans entered Nama that summer and he was assigned the number 002/003. This was because he, and associated partnerships and syndicates, were its biggest single client (Nama decided not to give anyone the kudos of being 001). The first thing that Nama tried to do was get a handle on the scale of his assets and liabilities – both within Nama’s control and also the details of his finances with banks outside of Ireland. The scale was impressive but also staggering.

The €4 billion man

Derek Quinlan, Nama would soon discover, was the €4 billion man. He and associated entities had borrowed €1.86 billion from Irish banks, and another €1.87 billion from British banks. This was a huge sum, but Quinlan was considered to be worth close to €1 billion in 2007. His borrowings were secured on some of the best property assets in Europe. Even in a historic crash, many remained very valuable. It was all very complicated, however. Quinlan had borrowings from 20 different banks, and he usually invested either with a partner or a syndicate of other investors.

His most high-profile assets were Claridge’s, the Connaught, and Berkeley hotels in London. Quinlan had bought these hotels along with other investors including Paddy McKillen for £750 million (then €1.1 billion) as part of a portfolio of blue-chip hotels from Blackrock. One of the hotels in the group, The Savoy, was sold immediately to Saudi Prince Alwaleed bin Talal. This left Quinlan and his co-investors with three of the best hotels in the world.

In 2004 he invited me along with a number of other Irish journalists to London to mark the deal. The evening started with drinks on the rooftop terrace of Claridge’s and then moved on to a private dining room in The Connaught, where Queen Elizabeth II had celebrated the hotel’s jubilee in 2007. “I like a quiet life and I don’t intend to change that,” Quinlan said before the meal. He declined to comment on who the other investors in the hotel were, saying they were “private”. 

Quinlan was gregarious, humorous and an engaging host. 

Looking back on it post the crash, for journalists tasked with being sceptical (myself included), it was all a bit cosy, like so much else in the Celtic Tiger. 

But that’s not how it was seen at the time. Back then, Quinlan was praised for pulling off a mega-coup, a deal that showed how Irish people went from working on British building sites to owning the infrastructure of its establishment within a generation. 

Later it would emerge that developer Paddy McKillen, stockbroker Kyran McLaughlin, and Riverdance co-founder Moya Doherty were among the investors.

In 2010, Sean FitzPatrick, the then chief executive of Anglo Irish Bank, which had financed the acquisition, told me he was also briefly a shareholder after another investor pulled out at the last minute. FitzPatrick stepped into the breach and took a stake along with two friends. The banker told me he got involved thinking that the syndicate would sell off all the other hotels, but then the Irish investors changed their minds and decided to hold onto them.

FitzPatrick and his two friends sold out a few months later making a £4 million profit. FitzPatrick’s involvement in a deal his bank financed wasn’t known to shareholders in Anglo. And in truth, even if it had been, most people would not have cared as the bank’s shares continued to surge upwards. Certainly, it wasn’t an issue for Quinlan or any other of his co-investors to be concerned with.

By the time Quinlan and his co-investors acquired the three London hotels, he had become a serious player. He had founded Quinlan Private and established an office that managed 140 property assets on the behalf of himself and high net worth syndicates that were worth €10 billion. 

Quinlan, however, was increasingly doing deals on his own, leaving his partners to manage Quinlan Private. The firm had scale and size, handling investments for hundreds of people ranging – from billionaires to senior counsels, medical surgeons, dentists, and the well-heeled. Syndicated deals included buying 20 three-star hotels from the Jurys Doyle Hotel Group for €1.1 billion, driving into Central Europe with a €1 billion deal flow, and building Four Seasons Hotels in Dublin, Prague, Budapest and Milan. Irish syndicates also owned a string of Marriott Hotels too.  

As the deals came and came, Quinlan had his own office near the one where his clients were serviced and he started to take greater risks as he did a series of big ticket deals. With a business partner, he bought the Santander headquarters in Madrid for €1.9 billion and then the Citigroup skyscraper in London for €1.1 billion. 

In Georgia, he had plans for a five-star golf and residential resort. He also teamed up with Bernard McNamara and the Dublin Docklands Development Authority to buy the Irish Glass Bottle site for €412 million, where he hoped to build a new quarter in Dublin. 

As a result of this wealth, Quinlan owned mansions in Dublin, London, New York and Cap Ferrat in the south of France where his yacht could be found moored. A natural networker, Quinlan was ambitious and hungry for deals. He operated at the top end of the market going up against investment banks, sovereign wealth funds, and the uber-rich. He appeared unassailable. Until he was not. 

A new reality

In October 2010, Nama was up and running. It called Derek Quinlan to lay down the law. Lawyers from Maples & Calder and accountants from PWC were all in attendance. It was made clear to Quinlan he needed to do something. Quinlan had met Nama before when its officials had privately frowned at his still conspicuous displays of wealth. When borrowers came to meet Nama at Dublin’s Treasury Building, they were put in windowless waiting rooms to remind them of their new reality. But this meeting was much harder for Quinlan than any he had previously attended. 

Nama said it would release monies from Quinlan’s accounts to fund him taking advice from PWC on what he should do next. The agency didn’t tell Quinlan to go bankrupt, but it was pushing him down that road by getting professionals to inform him he was insolvent and needed to do so. Quinlan was told to make his mind up in weeks.

He was not interested. Quinlan felt he could get through the crisis if he held his nerve, and if could somehow convince Nama to do likewise. He believed the market would recover. 

Quinlan was under fierce pressure. He agreed to cooperate with Nama, and agreed to move to London to demonstrate his resolve to try and reduce his debts.  

Quinlan never prepared a business plan or a sworn statement of affairs for Nama, as other developers did. However, he did agree to sell any asset he was asked to. This meant Nama never paid Quinlan a salary like it did other developers who cooperated. Nama hoovered up unencumbered assets worth a few million including cash, valuable artworks, and some stakes in properties with no debt. Nama took possession of 12 of his artworks worth more than €2 million and donated two to the National Gallery before selling the rest at auction.  

Unlike many other Irish developers, he had become international.

Quinlan’s wife Siobhan had assets in her own name. She had a minority stake in a significant car park business in Dublin, which provided some income. Quinlan also received money from friends in the form of loans – €300,000 from a Kerry hotelier and €150,000 from a British businessman. 

The tycoon Denis O’Brien loaned him over €1 million in 2010 secured on various artworks. 

O’Brien loaned Quinlan the money primarily to repay interest on a loan he was unable to meet because most of his income had by then been taken control of by Nama and his other banks. O’Brien quietly helped many others during the worst of the crisis, and there is nothing wrong with him helping Quinlan who he knew socially.  

In late 2012 O’Brien was repaid the €1.7 million. He was paid by the billionaire Barclay brothers, who were then backing Quinlan as the twins tried to seize exclusive control of Claridge’s, the Berkeley, and the Connaught. At the time, the businessman Paddy McKillen still owned 33 per cent of the group. 

In any event, Quinlan was able to keep going. He asked his friend Gerry Murphy to assist him in finding a way through his maze of debts – not just to Nama but to other banks. 

Murphy was a serial entrepreneur who went from owning a small petrol station in a Cork village to creating Great Gas Petroleum, a fuel business that had revenues of €100 million. He would prove a shrewd and loyal advisor to Quinlan over the following extraordinary decade. Owen Kelly, a chartered accountant, was another friend who helped him. 

Nama for its part told Quinlan to report to Paul Hennigan, a senior Nama portfolio manager. Hennigan, also a chartered accountant, was a former Bank of Ireland banker who was tough and intelligent. Nama asked him to look after some of its most complex cases, and Quinlan was near the top of the list. Ireland was broke, and Nama knew it had to sell assets in order to allow the country exit a the troika bailout. Nobody knew when the property market might turn in Ireland or Britain. The market for development land was down 90 per cent and there were no buyers for any assets in Ireland. 

Nama realised it had to sell prime assets as they were the only ones there was a market for. It had bought Quinlan’s loans from Irish banks at an average discount of 30 per cent. This is compared with a 57 per cent discount it paid for other loans. It knew that Quinlan’s assets could not only be sold but sold at a profit. The quality of most of Quinlan’s portfolio put him at the front of the queue.

Selling off, paying down

While he hadn’t predicted the domestic property crash, Derek Quinlan had been wise enough to move beyond Ireland. Unlike many other Irish developers, he had become international. About €1.1 billion of Quinlan’s borrowings, now owed to Nama, related to properties in London. However, he owed more than €100 million in relation to Irish deals where asset values had declined precipitously. Most of this related to just one deal: the acquisition of the Irish Glass Bottle site with other partners at the peak of the boom. He had another €25 million exposure to the United States, owed to Nama.

Most of his assets were earning income but this income was only just paying the interest, not the capital. He owed Nama almost £660 million (€800 million) secured on hotels, the Maybourne Hotel Group, a new brand which Claridge’s, the Berkeley and the Connaught were now under. He also owed money on the Clarence Hotel in Dublin along with others including members of U2. (Bono and The Edge both reportedly attended his 60th in Claridge’s in 2007.)   

He owed €450 million secured on offices that were let out to multinational clients. His Achilles heel was €100 million secured on development land, which was yielding almost no income and couldn’t be sold at the time. While his critics gossiped about rumoured sightings of Quinlan in Dublin and London restaurants, the reality was he was working hard to pay off his debts and was under pressure from Nama and his other banks to do so. He owed Bank of Scotland Ireland €6 million on a home he owned at 6 Shrewsbury Road, so he sold it in 2011 for €7 million clearing that debt. He owed €60 million to Barclays on a mansion in Cap Ferret, which had stunning waterfront views, putting greens, and a swimming pool. Quinlan sold this property in July 2011 to a French limited company associated with Bulat Utemuratov, Kazakhstan’s richest man. After paying French taxes, Barclays came within a few million of being repaid in full. The yacht Quinlan often kept at this mansion was taken by its lender Lombard. 

Bank of Ireland loaned Quinlan €50 million to fund various deals including the purchase of a home in Mayfair, London at 40 Charles Street. The bank loaned him £7.9 million just for its refurbishment. Nama took over these loans and sold the property for a profit to Ali Ben Bongo Ondimba, the president of Gabon, for €30 million. Quinlan was also involved in an ambitious plan to build eco mansions in California along with The Edge from U2. Scott Rankin, a former stockbroker, also had an interest here. At the time Rankin was thought to be Bono’s cousin, but after the U2 singer published his biography this year it emerged he was his half-brother. 

The eco-mansions project was fraught with planning difficulties because of the unique habitat surrounding it. Ultimately, The Edge bought Quinlan’s equity stake for just $1 and agreed to take on the $25 million debt associated with the project which he had personally guaranteed. Nama again made a profit in a tough situation where it could have gotten nothing back. At the same time, Nama also took control of an apartment in Malibu which Quinlan had attempted to sell at a lower price to a connected party to Quinlan which Nama achieved months later. 

Two big problems

Derek Quinlan had an impressive array of investment properties in Dublin 2 and Dublin 4 which he had assembled at a cost of tens of millions of euro during the boom. His main residence was 6 Shrewsbury Road which Quinlan had shrewdly bought for €1.9 million in the 1990s and kitted out with a wine cellar and swimming pool. He sold this for €7 million in 2011 to Garry Burke, an aviation leasing entrepreneur. Bank of Scotland Ireland and Nama shared the proceeds. Other Dublin 4 sales included 8 Raglan Road, 1 Elgin Road, 43 Ailesbury Road, and numbers 1 and 3 Shrewsbury Road. He also sold an apartment in the Merrion Hotel and a property at 29-30 Fitzwilliam Square. It was then onto other assets.

Quinlan sold a townhouse in New York at 20 East 64th Street for a reported $5 million loss after buying it for $26 million in 2005. He also sold his stake in a shopping centre in Barcelona, and his interest in the former Bank of Ireland headquarters on Baggot Street. The latter was bought by the beef baron Larry Goodman. In Dublin he sold 1-6 Sir John Rogerson’s Quay, an interest in a building in the IFSC and an interest in the Montevetro tower in Dublin’s docks. Quinlan sold most of these properties at a loss, as it would be at least another five to ten years before the market in Dublin for prime properties recovered. Nama also sold nine paintings Quinlan had once owned in 2011 for €2 million including Andy Warhol’s Dollar Sign, which fetched $782,500 in New York and Jack Yeats’ Man Doing Accounts, which sold for £183,650 in London.

Nama recovered 100 per cent of the debt attached to the Citi tower even though the six other lenders in the syndicate only recovered 70 per cent of their debt. 

At least all these assets could be sold. Quinlan had two bigger deals that were causing him greater problems. Quinlan had plans to build The Georgia Club, a high-end golf and residential resort in the United States. However, his timing was wrong as America went into its own recession. Just keeping it open required $2 million a year, so Nama sold it to the American turnaround specialist Alvarez & Marsal for $12 million, an $80 million shortfall on Quinlan’s debt, in 2011. Alvarez & Marsal subsequently sold the club in 2016 for $10 million having invested millions into the club. His other big issue was the Irish Glass Bottle Site in Dublin, which Quinlan had bought as part of a consortium for €411 million in 2006. Nama had bought this site at ten cent in the euro, and Quinlan’s partners in the deal had been either disbanded by the state or gone bankrupt. It would only be in 2020 that developer Johnny Ronan and his business partners would buy 80 per cent of this site for €200 million, valuing it all at €250 million. The Georgia Club and the Glass Bottle site accounted for over half of the losses Quinlan was not able to repay Nama prior to his bankruptcy. The rest was overdrafts and unsecured borrowings which Nama had no hope of ever being repaid on given Quinlan had no other unsecured assets.

Meanwhile, in Spain… (and London)

Derek Quinlan acquired the 11 million square feet Banco Santander campus along with his business partner Glenn Maud for €1.9 billion in 2008. The rent from this building was expected to generate €2.65 billion over its lifetime. Quinlan and Maud had a clever plan to make money from the building, but the credit crunch killed it. Both men ultimately lost control of the building, and during that process Robert Tchenguiz managed to buy a huge debt associated with the building for just €5,000 because its bank considered it worthless. How exactly this happened, and why Quinlan wasn’t allowed to bid for it, is as yet unknown but was likely to come out in a court case if Tchenguiz tried to enforce it.

The year before Banco Santander, Quinlan and Maud had teamed up to buy the Citi Tower in London for over £1 billion. The 1.2 million sq ft, 40-storey building is one of the best known in London’s Canary Wharf. 

Derek Quinlan also owned 35 per cent of Coroin Ltd, the company which owned the Maybourne Hotel Group. He had however a golden share, which meant nobody could fully control it without his say-so. The battle between Quinlan and his rival shareholder Paddy McKillen for control of the hotels is worthy of a Netflix series. It involves the owners of The Daily Telegraph, the Barclay brothers, Middle East royalty, and many well-known Irish business leaders. It is not for this article to determine the rights and wrongs of what occurred, in what was a fierce dispute that ended in both parties selling their shares in the hotels to the Qatari royal family. Later McKillen had another dispute with the new owners of the hotel group, but this too is not only a long story but one still running. These three big deals do however need to be considered in the context of Derek Quinlan’s witness statement setting out his reasons for going bankrupt.   

Debt and deals

The decision by Derek Quinlan to file for bankruptcy, more than a dozen years after he first faced such a prospect, cannot have been easy. Robert Tchenguiz had him cornered as he pursued Quinlan to repay a debt of €120 million the Iranian-born businessman had acquired for just €5,000. In a profile in September, The Sunday Times described sixty-something Tchenguiz, who lives in a £20 million mansion with his 30-something Polish model girlfriend Julia Dybowska, as a “flamboyant investor”.

In a statement released following his bankruptcy, Quinlan pointedly quoted Justice Popplewell of the England & Wales High Court (Commercial) in a 2018 case that concluded Tchenguiz was “not a good witness. He seemed to take little care in his language or the accuracy of his evidence, often contradicting something he had said previously. On some occasions, he admitted that what he had previously said was untrue…” 

Quinlan believed he had reached a deal with Tchenguiz not to pursue the debt years ago, but then he started to ask for it again. Quinlan was convinced he would be vindicated in the courts, but he didn’t have the £1 million plus required to defend himself. Tchenguiz clearly believed he was in the right. In his bankruptcy witness statement Quinlan blamed Nama for not allowing him to start again for his lack of resources to fund the case. Quinlan is understandably sore. He has repaid Nama more than any other borrower in total terms. It allowed other borrowers to leave sooner after they incurred losses even greater than his by selling their debts at a discount to big funds. Many of these funds then quietly let the borrowers go after a suitable period, often with a few assets in return for their assistance, allowing them to get going again. Quinlan tried many times to escape Nama, but it didn’t do a deal with him unlike many others. Nama doesn’t comment on individual clients so it is not clear why it held onto Quinlan. 

A central claim in Quinlan’s witness statement when going bankrupt is that Nama forced him to sell his assets at the wrong time which otherwise would have allowed him to repay Nama in full. 

It is certainly true that Nama would have recovered more if it had waited for the Irish and British economies to recover more. But Nama was under fierce pressure from the Irish government and Europe to get money in. Quinlan had the best assets, and Nama knew by selling them it could make money as it had bought them at a discount on average of 30 per cent from Ireland’s banks.  

It did this because that was what it was asked to do by the Irish state and by the EU/IMF which had bailed out the country.    

Would Derek Quinlan have been able to repay his €410 million shortfall if Nama had waited long enough? It is impossible to tell, as there are a lot of factors at play. Nama did sell the Audley Square car park, for example, for £147 million in 2011. If it had waited a few years more it would have gotten more, but equally, Quinlan had attempted to sell it in 2009 for £120 million. If that deal had happened Quinlan’s banks would have gotten less. If Nama had backed Quinlan in his plan to convert the car park into new homes for the uber-rich, maybe it would have made money, but maybe it wouldn’t have. Politically it would have been criticised for having any involvement in building homes for the super-wealthy. 

John Caudwell, the mobile phones retailer, who bought the Audley site from Nama, has put many millions of euro more into building it out. Twelve years later it has a completion date of late 2025, in what will be, Caudwell believes, the “world’s most prestigious apartment block”. Whether Caudwell will make any money selling apartments in Audley remains to be seen but building them has been a herculean task.  

Turning to his luxury hotels in London. Quinlan facilitated the sale of his debt, owed to Bank of Scotland, secured on the equity on his 35 per cent share in Claridges, the Connaught, and the Berkeley to the Barclay Brothers. 

This meant the most Nama could recover from its £660 million debt on the hotels was the £660 million it secured in 2011. There was no easy route for it to get more out of the hotel group. 

Nama recovered 100 per cent of the debt attached to the Citi tower even though the six other lenders in the syndicate only recovered 70 per cent of their debt. 

All seven syndicate banks, including Nama, were due to be treated equally under the lenders’ agreement but Nama refused to accept any sale unless it exited at a profit.  

The £620 million of the Knightsbridge Estate in April 2010 was sale-agreed by Quinlan and his partners before Nama existed. Quinlan’s last remaining significant London asset, a school site in Chelsea, was due to be sold in 2009. However, Nama stopped the sale in early 2010 and secured a higher price in late 2010. The sale of the Quinlan Private offices in Dublin, London and New York were sold at prices not much different than today’s value. 

He bought world-class assets, which could be sold by Nama even in the worst fall in property prices in living history. 

There is certainly an argument that Quinlan’s Irish assets in Dublin 4 and Dublin 2 would have sold for more in the years after 2010 to 2013, but the extent of Ireland’s property recovery wasn’t yet being widely anticipated. Quinlan’s Ailesbury Road home is worth more today, but in the single-digit millions. The now Turkish embassy, where Quinlan Private once was, was sold for €6 million after Michael O’Leary declined to buy it in 2013. Two Sir John Rogerson’s Quay properties were sold in 2012, one under the instruction of a government minister. Both are worth up to €10 million more today.

While Quinlan criticises Nama, it also could be argued it protected him. Quinlan amassed powerful opponents during the crash who wanted control of his assets. Bankrupting him was a sure way of getting him off the pitch. None of his enemies managed to do so, until now. 

Did Nama string Quinlan along by leaving him in limbo? Might it have been better for all if it had forced him into bankruptcy rather than dangling the prospect of escape for over a decade? 

Was it unfairly harsh on him because of his high profile versus some other developers who were let go despite leaving bigger debts behind them? 

If Nama suspected that Quinlan had monies it didn’t know about, why was no evidence of this ever produced to justify not letting him leave? Nama spent a lot of money trying to track rumoured assets held by developers including Quinlan. At one time it was rumoured Quinlan had money in Lichtenstein, but nothing was ever found, and there is no suggestion it was ever there. 

Was someone in Nama worried about negative PR if Quinlan bounced back? 

Quinlan has advised others on property deals, and he has worked for his wife who has her own assets on various projects. Siobhán Quinlan put €7.5 million in late 2015 into a Ballsbridge property deal led by Johnny Ronan. At the time nobody was prepared to back Ronan in a risky deal to acquire a site without planning permission or a tenant. 

Siobhán Quinlan was later bought out at a profit, and Ronan went on to secure Meta as a tenant. 

The building has just been sold for €550 million to a Spanish billionaire generating huge economic value along the way among architects, building contractors, lawyers, accountants and so on.  

Where did Siobhán Quinlan get the money to invest with Ronan? She hasn’t said publicly, but Nama presumably asked. The fact no action was taken suggests it was her own money, and there is no suggestion otherwise. Siobhán Quinlan is also reported to be involved in various housing projects in Ireland. All of this is of interest to the business reader, but the general public doesn’t really care what Quinlan or his wife is up to these days. 

At this stage many developers formerly in Nama are back building, and nobody raises an eyebrow. Only a tiny number of them went bankrupt, but usually because they had assets outside of Nama. Developers have a skillset that is needed, and former clients of Nama are today contributing to the Irish economy. Some former Nama officials who went into the private sector have done well developing, trading and speculating on property. They too have moved on.  

*****

Nama doesn’t comment on individual borrowers, so we may never know for sure its reasoning. Few, if any, of its original officials who dealt with the sale of Quinlan’s biggest assets remain in the agency.  

Derek Quinlan is 75 years of age and facing a year of bankruptcy in Britain.    

Quinlan lived the cut and thrust of raw capitalism for many years, now he’s experiencing the cut. 

He was, and is, a skilled financier and astute property investor. 

He bought world-class assets, which could be sold by Nama even in the worst fall in property prices in living history. 

Quinlan borrowed too much, but equally, he repaid huge sums when Ireland was shut out of the international money markets. Quinlan repaid 88.5 per cent of the money he owed, one of the highest repayment rates of any major Irish developer. Nama bought his debts at an average discount of 30 per cent, so it made money selling it all, even though there was a deficit. Quinlan heads into bankruptcy with a complex legacy and the hope of starting again.