The former chief executive of the bankrupt Marlborough recruitment group, who accumulated an estimated €70 million paper fortune at the height of the boom, won an action yesterday to recover €2,031.60 in redundancy against the company.
Mr David McKenna, the ex-plumber who bought Marlborough for €7,500 and built it into a €150 million business empire with 400 staff across the Republic and Britain, was awarded four weeks redundancy by the Employment Appeals Tribunal.
Mr Brian Sherry, solicitor for Mr McKenna, explained his client was unable to attend the hearing as he had to go abroad on business at short notice. He said Mr McKenna had not been in paid employment since Marlborough collapsed last February with estimated debts of €15 million. Since that time, Mr McKenna has been "endeavouring to set himself up in business", Mr Sherry told the tribunal.
Two other former Marlborough directors, Mr John Joyce and Mr John Nolan, also received redundancy. The three will be paid from the State's insolvency payment fund, which is gettributions. The tribunal ruled the appellates were entitled to four weeks redundancy to a maximum of €507.90 per week.
The group's receiver, Mr David Hughes of Ernst and Young, declined to contest the hearing. Because payment has been ordered by a quasi-judicial body, the three are regarded as preferential claimants.
Victory will be bitter-sweet for Mr McKenna who acquired Marlborough from a receiver in 1992 and transformed it into one of the Republic's largest recruitment groups, making himself a paper millionaire in the process.
Having expanded rapidly during the years of the Celtic Tiger, the company bore the brunt of the subsequent slow down.
Unable to cope with a sharp slump in demand for information technology workers, Marlborough floundered in the shrinking jobs market.
As the dot-com boom rapidly turned to an unmitigated bust, Marlborough began to shed workers and accumulate debts.
To the dismay of shareholders, it last year downgraded the value of acquisitions by €15.75 million following an impairment review and was forced to write off €3.5 million in unpaid bills.