THE TRIAL OF three senior executives at Anglo Irish Bank has heard details of an angry phone call between Sean Quinn and bosses at the bank, just hours before a plan began to end the holding he had built up in the bank.
During the phone call Quinn told the bank he did not want to go ahead with the plan which would see him getting rid of the financial instruments which had built up his ownership in the bank.
Quinn remained optimistic that the share price in the bank would recover and the plan wouldn’t have to go ahead, the former CEO of the Quinn Group Liam McCaffrey told the court this afternoon.
The conversation was “angry and difficult”, McCaffrey said, and ended either when David Drumm of Anglo walked out or when Sean Quinn hung up the phone.
McCaffrey said Anglo told Quinn that he had needed to go ahead with the plan, which had been put together as the share price in the bank cratered.
“They… were saying if you don’t [do this] then we have a major, major problem here,” said McCaffrey.
The conference call in question took place on the day in which the unwinding of the contracts for difference began in July 2008, the prosecution said.
McCaffrey said the conference call was between himself, Sean Quinn, and finance director Dara O’Reilly for the Quinn Group with CEO David Drumm on the Anglo side, along with accused Pat Whelan and Willie McAteer, he said. He believed Matt Moran may have been on the call too.
McCaffrey told the court that he and Quinn had met with Sean FitzPatrick and David Drumm of Anglo at the Ardboyne Hotel in Navan in September 2007, ten months earlier.
McCaffrey said this was the first time that the Anglo bosses had been told about the level of Quinn’s holding in the bank through contracts for difference (CFDs), which now stood at 24 per cent.
McCaffrey said they were concerned at the level of it “and somewhat surprised”.
The discussion moved on to what Quinn’s intention was to do with the holding and he told the Anglo bosses that it was purely an investment which he would unwind if there was some recovery in the share price.
McCaffrey was the fifth witnesses out of around 103 who are due to appear in the trial of three former executives of Anglo Irish Bank, which is in its second day.
Seán FitzPatrick of Greystones, Pat Whelan of Malahide, and William McAteer of Auburn Villas in Rathmines have all pleaded not guilty to charges under section 60 of the Companies Act of providing unlawful financial assistance to people – including the so-called Maple 10 – to buy shares in the bank in 2008
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