The founder of the Quinn Group has said he did not become aware of financial guarantees given by eight subsidiaries of Quinn Insurance to the wider group until 2010, five years after the guarantees were first given.
Sean Quinn Sr also said he does not recall being notified of any of the three board meetings in 2005, 2006 or 2007 which were allegedly held to give effect to the guarantees.
He was giving evidence to a Central Bank inquiry probing whether former Quinn Insurance directors, Liam McCaffrey and Kevin Lunney, contravened 1994 regulations requiring that internal procedures and control mechanisms were sound and adequate.
The inquiry is focused on the provision of guarantees to the wider Quinn Group by eight Quinn Insurance subsidiaries in 2005, 2006 and 2007 against loans that totalled €1.2 billion.
The move had the effect of undermining the insurer's technical reserves, which could have been required if the company experienced financial difficulties.
The inquiry's legal practitioner team claims the two men failed to inform other Quinn Insurance board members or its investment committee of proposals to enter the guarantees.
Mr McCaffrey and Mr Lunney deny that they failed in their obligations.
Giving evidence this morning, Sean Quinn Sr said he did not have a huge recollection of 2005 when the decision was made on a new finance deal for the Quinn Group.
He said he recalls discussions with executives from Barclays, when it came closer to doing a deal and a decision was required.
He said a senior executive of Barclays told him that not only would the bank not be seeking to take a security on Quinn Insurance as it was a regulated entity, it would actually be illegal to do so.
He said he was not involved in the details of the deal, but knew Barclays did not want security over specific assets, but wanted a guarantee over the Quinn Group, with the exception of Quinn Insurance.
Mr Quinn questioned why he would have looked at the detail when he had executives looking after it for him.
He said he was responsible for running the manufacturing business, which had a lot going on at the time and so was not involved in the administration of the Quinn Group.
If he had looked at the documents of the deal, it would only have been a one or two page summary, he said.
He said he would normally peruse over most of it, or give an opinion to Liam McCaffrey or ask some questions.
But he said it was never mentioned to him that there was a guarantee over the eight subsidiaries of Quinn Insurance.
He said March 2010 was the first time he heard about the effect of the guarantees.
Asked by Eoin McCullough, SC for the inquiry's legal practitioner team, whether it was surprising that he had no knowledge over which subsidiaries had given guarantees, Mr Quinn said he would have known that all group subsidiaries would have given guarantees expect for Quinn Insurance's.
He said he was not aware that the subsidiaries of Quinn Insurance were not regulated entities.
"You can say I was stupid or something but that was my understanding," he told the inquiry.
Mr Quinn said he also did not read the the finance documents when they were issued.
He said he would have looked at the profit and loss details in any accounts sent to him for the subsidiaries but nothing else.
He said that when he learned in 2010 about the guarantees it was a cause of huge disappointment and huge anger to him that his advisors would put a document like this together.
Mr Quinn said he does not recall being notified of any of the three board meetings in 2005, 2006 or 2007 which were allegedly held to give effect to the guarantees.
He said he could not recall being at any board meeting with the other three directors of the company, where he had not acted as chairman of the meeting.
He also said he did not believe a single document had been given to him by those three directors that he had refused to sign.
He added that he would sometimes sign 20 or 30 such documents in two or three minutes.
Mr Quinn said he would not read them all, posing the question to the inquiry, why would he when he trusted the men who were giving them to him?
He said he was fully aware now that he should have read the documents, having being through what he had been through with Anglo Irish Bank.
But he said he was not aware of that at the time and trusted a lot of people then.
Asked by Mr McCullough if the situation sounds like a systems failure, Mr Quinn replied "Yeah".
Asked whether he thought it was a sound or adequate approach, Mr Quinn replied: "If I was doing it again I would do it differently."
He said at its peak the Quinn Group had 7,500-8,000 staff and he had depended on people.
In evidence earlier this week, Mr McCaffrey alleged the effect of the guarantees on Quinn Insurance arose as a result of an error in the legal advice received from A&L Goodbody solicitors, something the law firm denies.
While Mr Lunney claimed that while he was aware of the refinancing deals that led to the guarantees, he had almost no involvement in it.
He also claimed that while he had signed documents giving rise to the guarantees, they were part of a volume of paperwork that passed over his desk, and if he had known they would put extra risk on Quinn Insurance, it would have raised a red flag.
Quinn Insurance collapsed into administration in early 2010 after the discovery of a massive financial hole in the firm's accounts.
The Central Bank launched an investigation into Quinn Insurance itself and in 2013 fined it €5m after it found that it had failed between October 2005 and March 2010 to maintain adequate solvency margins and had insufficient internal control mechanisms.
The regulator also investigated whether there had been breaches of regulations by management of Quinn Insurance between 2005 and 2008, and in 2015 that became a formal inquiry into this issue.
The current inquiry is not, however, looking at the causes of the collapse of the insurer.
