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Dublin: 11 °C Wednesday 22 May, 2013

Court told Quinn Insurance will need €738m from State fund

Administrators for Quinn Insurance tell the High Court that the company will need €738m to remain a viable concern.

Image: Mark Stedman/Photocall Ireland

QUINN INSURANCE will need to draw down around €738m from a State-run fund in order to remain viable, the High Court has been told.

Administrators for the company gave the figure to the court today as it lodged an application for access to funds from the State’s Insurance Compensation Fund.

RTÉ News reports that Justice Nicholas Kearns, the president of the High Court, permitted the immediate drawdown of €320m from the fund, in order to permit the transfer of the company to the US insurance firm Liberty Mutual, which is to take over the insurer.

A further €418m will be cleared to be drawn down, pending further applications to the court.

Counsel for the administrators, Denis McDonald, told the court that the company was mindful of the burden it was placing on the taxpayer – but said the total cost to the taxpayer of putting the firm into liquidation could be significantly greater.

The Irish Times reports that lawyers for the Minister for Finance, Michael Noonan, consented to the transfer.

Simon Carswell wrote that the company had a deficit of €851.5m at the end of August.

He added that a further hearing was to be held tomorrow to confirm the sale of the company to Liberty Mutual; in the meantime, the administrators will meet with representatives from two lobby groups opposing the sale.

An Act providing for a 2 per cent levy on insurance premiums, intended to raise enough money to cover the Quinn Insurance funding requirements, was signed into law by President McAleese last Friday after being rushed through the Oireachtas.

When it first published that Act in mid-September, the government said that the extra funding was needed to cover the ‘solvency breaches’ which would stop the company meeting claims as they fell due.

Various ministers have defended the bill in the Dáil, arguing that liquidating the company would mean the loss of around 1,600 jobs.

Government proposes levy on insurance policies – to pay for Quinn bailout >

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Comments (17 Comments)

  • Why doesn’t Quinn pay, he has a personal fortune of more than that?

    Reply
  • Corporate socialism is alive and well in Ireland. :-(

    Will we see any prosecutions over this?

    Not. Bloody Likely.

    Reply
  • EM 04/10/11 #

    I’m paying those feckers enough every month as it is…

    Reply
  • Another way of saying bail out ..

    Reply
  • Why wind it down. Shut the doors and let it go bankrupt.

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  • I worked on the building of his palatial mansion he built in Cavan, his “old” house, (a rather grand 5 bedroom mansion in it’s own right) encroached 3 ft onto his proposed new driveway, instead of re-drawing the driveway he knocked the house and never even bothered removing a lot of the contents.
    Myself and a few workmates watched the destruction and a comment was made – “what a bloody waste, I hope it comes back to haunt him”.

    Reply
  • Ahem. What does this mean for people insured with Quinn?

    Reply
  • We stand by and let this go on. Quinn and the Golden Circle and share manipulation – that’s where I’d be starting and i certainly wouldn’t be bailing that out with your money until that was sorted out. Ah we are being led on a merry dance, robbed blind by our own – hoodwinked by spin at every juncture and the country falls apart. Sometimes words fail me!

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  • speechless,i usually tear into these alice in wonderland (i wonder if i am in the real world) type of misfits.you have to understand that these people actually learned how to screw YOU and ME over a profitable number of years,especially during the celtic tiger. why? because government officials were so busy lining their own pockets that nobody was watching them.where was our financial regulator?now there is somebody who definately should be in prison! but no! when the shit hit the fan,like with bertie,she quit,got her golden handshake,and a nice fat pension!i wonder does she live in good old ireland now or in a nice villa somewheres…..somewhere with no extradition no doubt.and the bankers! being a banker is like having a licence to screw!you can be sure of one thing,all the other bankers around the world who got caught with their fingers in the “cookie jar” got jailed! do you know why? because the governments have laws that put people behind bars for breaking laws! NOT in ireland,our government had the insight before the celtic tiger too make and pass laws under our noses to protect the crooked bankers,politicians,insurance brokers,construction magnates,etc;! so in the end it doesnt matter how many times these people screw us,there is a law there to protect them and thats why you will never see a crooked banker in prison! god bless NAMA!

    Reply
  • If the administrators weren’t busy destroying what was a very profitable company, just in case the Quinn family were entitled to their company back, & looked after our investment in Anglo Irish Bank as taxpayers, by making sure Quinn insurance remained producing the very healthy profits, which could have been used to make sure the Irish taxpayer doesn’t have to suffer unnecessarily. The Administrators fired the management within the Quinn Group that had the experience & skills to keep the business profitable. This was done to stop an possible leaks as to how badly they were managing the business while claiming enormous salaries for themselves. The Quinn Group & their employees have been used as scape goats for the gutless failure of our Politicians to ensure that the bankers who caused this mess with corrupt practices were disciplined, so as to prevent this from happening again. But this will happen again, because all we have taught the Bankers is that even when the make a mess we the taxpayer will right them a blank cheque. It would be a lot more wise to invest our money in an Irish Company than blindly having to pay back failed gamblers called Bond Holders.

    Reply

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