Once upon a time not so long ago, Seán Quinn was as elusive as the Pimpernel. He didn't give media interviews. The strategy served him well. The media, for the most part, bought into the image of a shy countryman who had the Midas touch in business, and lived a simple life. He was an antidote to the brash Dublin entrepreneurs with their wideboy sensibilities and trophy houses.

Today, as his empire comes under serious strain, Quinn is as likely to pop up on Oprah's couch as in one of his factories. He can't get enough of the media.

On Thursday, he gave his third major TV interview in 18 months. There was also a spontaneous phonecall to RTÉ's Prime Time last April, in which he threw out a line and then apparently replaced the receiver before Richard Crowley could ask him a few relevant questions.

He now displays the cut of a man desperate to get his message across, to counter what he sees as a false picture being portrayed by a media that once adored him.

Like many who reached for the stars in recent times, he has fallen with a bang. He owes the taxpayer, through Anglo Irish Bank, nearly €3bn on foot of insane share-buying that went wrong. His insurance company, Quinn Insurance, is in administration because the Financial Regulator believed it wasn't being properly managed. The remainder of his empire is intact, but its future without the insurance cash cow is far from secure.

Questions have been raised about how the insurance company was run under his chairmanship. He maintains all his woes are down to the reckless gamble on Anglo Irish shares. A different body of opinion has it that Quinn Insurance was a house of cards whose construction was halted only by the intervention of the regulator.

So Quinn has reversed the policy of a lifetime to get his message across. As a PR strategy, it is one for the textbooks. Seán Quinn talks directly to the people on prime time television. They can see what a fine fellow he is. They can see he is a countryman with no airs and graces. He mentions his family and rural Ireland. He speaks of himself in the third person. These little morsels add up in the viewer's mind, painting the picture of a man who must be believed, whose word is his bond, who has been a victim of some dark force bearing down from Dublin.

All that remains to complete the picture is the meat of the interview, the facts. And there, unfortunately, the self-portrait begins to go awry.

On Thursday, Prime Time reporter Paul Murphy asked him about the controversial manner in which Quinn Direct – the motor insurance arm – was alleged to have done its business. Murphy cited the case of John Deegan, who was a backseat passenger in a car crash in 2002, leaving him a paraplegic. The driver was insured by Quinn Direct (QD).

For seven years, all the way to the High Court, QD claimed Deegan was a fraudster who had fallen from a tower block in Ballymun. Once it got to court, the judge severely criticised QD for basing its case on no evidence. A settlement of €1.7m followed.

Murphy asked Quinn about the case, Initially, Quinn said he was not very much aware of the details of the case. "I read about it. I wouldn't know the day-to-day about it," he said. Murphy pressed him about the judge's comments and Quinn's pursuit of severely disabled man on the basis of no evidence.

Quinn shifted in his chair and looked intently at his interviewer.

"If you look at the history of that case, how it was notified to the garda, to the hospital, you should have a look at it… Was it reported as a car accident and I can tell you it wasn't… The case was not notified as an accident. That's a fact. The case was notified as a man falling off a balcony."

Murphy checked it out. The case was notified to both the hospital and the gardaí as a road traffic accident.

The Deegan case was the worst of several examples of how the insurance company would contest claims all the way to court, using the threat of potentially ruinous costs against a claimant, before settling in the early stages of the hearing after admonishments from a judge.

Quinn believes the insurance company should never have been placed in administration. "Two months ago [before administration], Quinn Direct was making €3m a week," he told Murphy. "Now it is losing €3m a week."

If these figures are accurate, there can be only one of two explanations. Either the company was being run on an amazingly sound basis under Quinn's management and is now being run by fools appointed by the regulator, or it was being run in an unsustainable way that would end in a spectacular crash, and is now being brought back to the real world by the administrators. Nobody believes the administrators are fools.

The administration followed the discovery by the regulator that assets in the Quinn group were being used both as security against loans and for solvency purposes by the insurance company. In other words, the assets were being used as collateral twice over which. if done knowingly, suggests dodgy behaviour, to put it at its mildest.

Quinn told Prime Time that neither he nor anybody else in the company knew what had happened. "Nobody put two and two together," he said. If this is correct, then the removal of Quinn from the insurance business should be welcomed by every policy-holder and taxpayer in the country. It beggars belief that, in a properly-run company, management could be ignorant of such details.

Murphy asked whether Quinn kept changing his story about his and the insurance company's financial affairs. In January 2009, in a bright, shiny interview with RTE's Tommie Gorman, Quinn had said his losses in Anglo amounted to "more than €1bn" and that the insurance company had one of the best solvency ratios in the business. Now, he admits his losses are in the region of €3bn.

"As regards being over €1bn, I was right about that," he said on Thursday, as he issued a grin.

He has no excuse for the claims he made then about solvency. "Our solvency has been below what we would have liked for the last two years," he admitted to Murphy.

The solvency matter is a crucial one for the insurance company. Quinn repeatedly said the regulator "would like" to have 150% solvency rate, as if it were a hobby horse of the regulator's.

The implication was that there was no solvency problem. Quinn repeatedly implied that the company should have been allowed to continue trading despite not meeting the regulator's requirements. In other words, there should have been one rule for Quinn and another for all other insurance companies.

Later on in the 50-minute interview, as he defended how the insurance company was run, he mentioned what he described as a "fraudulent memo" that had been published. This was a reference to a Sunday Tribune story in 2007 about one aspect of Quinn Direct's operation. "That has been proven to be fraudulent by the guards," he said.

Nothing has been proven in relation to the memo. In the week after the story was published, Quinn took out half-page ads in national newspapers hailing his integrity. Repeatedly he used the phrase, "my word is my bond".

He also revealed on Thursday that Quinn Insurance did not employ an in-house actuary, something that might explain why the company had problems with sums. As for repaying his debt to the taxpayers, Quinn suggested that €2bn­ of it would be "very easily paid back". Surely even Bill Gates would have a chuckle at such nonchalance over two thousand million euro.

The most plausible element of Thursday's interview was Quinn's expression of regret over the impending job losses in the insurance company. Beyond that, facts kept getting in the way of spin.

What emerged was the picture of a man who basically doesn't understand the insurance industry. At first he shook up the business, particularly in relation to the cost of claims, which had been little more than layers of jam for lawyers. And while his strategy in this reaped rewards, a number of cases suggest it lurched far beyond the slashing of legal fees.

Quinn's insurance company garnered huge quantities of cash, both for his share dealing and in financing other arms of the group. Yet the emerging facts suggest a day of reckoning was on the way had the regulator not intervened.

On Thursday, Quinn said he still maintained that the regulator's intervention was one of the "worst mistakes" in corporate history. Sometimes, even spin has its limits.