If Mr Larry Goodman is a beef baron then Mr Pascal Phelan was - for a time at least - his knight errant. More than 20 years ago Mr Goodman hired Mr Phelan to run Anglo Irish Meats, the Irish operation of Goodman International and at the time the largest beef processor in Ireland.
Mr Phelan - a former executive with CBF, the livestock and meat board - left after four years to set up his own company, Master Meats. His decision to sell out of the business in 1987 and Mr Goodman's alleged involvement in the deal is the backdrop to the court case that got underway yesterday after a delay of 13 years.
Prior to joining Anglo Irish Meats, Mr Phelan had held a number of jobs with the CBF, rising to the position of European Development Manager based in Brussels with responsibility for Europe and the Middle East. His time with the CBF convinced him that the future of the Irish industry lay in exporting valued added products rather than just carcasses.
After three years with Goodman he left to put his ideas into practice, buying three run-down meat factories and starting to bone, butcher and vacuum-pack beef for the European supermarket trade. Master Meats was a success and when the company was three years old it had sales of £100 million (€127 million), according to Mr Phelan. He then tried to take the company to the next stage by going into business with Jordanian businessman Mr Zacharia El Taher who was a major player in the Middle East market.
Their partnership did not last long and within two years he had sold out to Mr Taher who, Mr Phelan maintains, was by that stage acting as a front for Mr Goodman. The complex legal actions that culminated yesterday began almost immediately after the deal but the pursuit of his former boss did not consume all of Mr Phelan's energy.
In 1990 he re-entered the meat business with a £5 million investment in the pork industry. He is now better known for the 1998 launch of an "entertainment restaurant" on New York's Broadway called Mars 2112. Mr Phelan owns one-third of the project which opened another outlet in Chicago last October. The restaurants offer "event dining" where customers are entertained by high tech audio visual systems and special effects. The New York operation is 33,000 square feet in size, serves 700,000 customers a year and is valued at more than $35 million, according to Mr Phelan.
Mr Goodman has not been idle either during the past 13 years. In 1990 he lost control of his company to the banks and has spent much of the intervening period buying it back from them and a series of investors. The last of his financial backers exited last year.
Mr Goodman bought his first meat plant in 1966 in Dundalk and from there built the Goodman International empire which came tumbling down in 1990 when the Iraqi Government defaulted on a number of large contracts during the Gulf War. Mr Goodman and his companies received a huge amount of financial and other assistance from the State along the way and this came under scrutiny in 1993 during the Beef Tribunal. Mr Phelan also featured at the Tribunal, but was only a bit player compared with Mr Goodman's staring role.
