As an aside a friend told me something that shocked me with regards to Anglo.
He is in the law game in banking, up till quite recently anglo didn’t have a law dept and just rode roughshod over all the banking regulations. The regulator got on their case and they employed one solicitor to appease him, but compare this to a bank I worked for in the uk that had a team of 40 in the legal dept.

Quinn Insurance received the heaviest fine ever handed down by the regulator – €3.25m in 2008 – for the improper lending of money to Quinn for his stock market gambling. The excuse that the money was subsequently repaid only cuts it so far because it would seem to have borrowed effectively from Anglo Irish, which now means us. Quinn was fined €200,000 personally and told to disengage from management of the company. It was a far lighter punishment than his recklessness deserved. There are good grounds for believing Quinn Insurance should have been taken into administration back then.

I ADMIT that in July 2008 I wrote about Quinn’s importance to the Irish economy and his willingness to create jobs in areas where nobody else, especially state agencies, would have borrowed. However, it soon became clear that his gamble on Anglo Irish was a lot bigger than had been believed and that it had not been done with his own money. As the saying goes, “when the facts change, I change my mind.” The more I have learnt about Quinn’s way of doing business the less impressed I have become.

And here’s the 2008 Sunday Times piece.

Even without the oxygen of publicity Quinn has become a legend, the biggest beast in the corporate jungle that flourished during the Celtic tiger era. Here is a man from humble beginnings who has created a multi-billion-euro empire spanning hotels, golf courses, pubs, insurance firms, cement and radiator makers and overseas properties.

This newspaper’s 2008 Rich List not only has him at number one in Ireland with a net worth of €4.7 billion, but also includes Quinn in the top 20 richest people in Britain due to the fact that he lives north of the border.

It is not only wealth that marks Quinn out. The man is also a doughty opponent of establishment monopolies. That’s what drove him to take on Ireland’s biggest industrial company in the cement sector, to crash the insurance party at a time when customers were being fleeced, and to pick up where Bupa left off in its battle with VHI.

And, more importantly

That low profile proved useful last week when one of Quinn’s biggest wagers turned out to be a beaten docket. Using complicated financial instruments, Quinn had borrowed heavily over the last two years, acquiring the right to buy shares in Anglo Irish Bank at a later date in the expectation that the share price would continue rising.

The bets were placed at prices significantly higher than the value of Anglo Irish stock today. Quinn has now repaid all those loans and taken possession of the devalued bank stock. He won’t say how much he has lost, but speculation has it that he paid €1 billion more for the shares than they are now worth.

This loss is staggering. It is quite possibly the biggest financial loss ever suffered by an individual in the history of this state. Equally staggering is that this blow does not seem to have affected Quinn’s business empire to any visible extent. He has not sold any assets that we know of to fund the share purchases.

So if he didn’t have sufficient cash in the bank to do the deal, then he must have borrowed the money — an extraordinary vote of confidence in his business given that lenders have practically closed their doors. Whatever the explanation, Quinn’s robust show of strength is good news for his thousands of employees in Ireland and particularly for a border region that would suffer badly should Quinn’s empire crumble.

Facts don’t change. Only the way of interpreting them.

But yeah, amazing how the language has changed. The risk-takers, the ones who know no fear. the TRUE heroes of this new Ireland.

All the hardship aside, it is quite funny when you think about it.