Goodman loses €1.4m as legal saga ends

BEEF baron Larry Goodman will not get back the €1.4 million premium he paid the State for his cancelled export credit insurance cover that led to the marathon legal battle settled yesterday.

The fee, paid to the Department of Industry and Commerce in 1989 for insurance on a €127m beef export contract, almost offsets the €1.5m legal bill facing the taxpayer as a result of the 14-year-long proceedings. Mr Goodman's company, Allied Irish Beef Processors (AIBP), will pay its own legal costs.

Under the terms of the settlement, AIBP agreed to withdraw a claim against the State for €100m plus damages and costs. The figure of €100m equated to the 80% of the contract value which the department had undertaken to insure.

In return, the department's successor, the Department of Enterprise, Trade and Employment, agreed to drop a counterclaim for the recovery from Goodman Holdings, part of the AIBP Group, of around €5m the State paid to a bank in 1990 to underwrite a shipment of the company's beef to Iraq.

Both Goodman Holdings and the department said yesterday that if the 5m was ever recovered from the Iraqis, the money would be refunded to the State.

The long-running legal saga began in 1989 after then Minister for Industry and Commerce Des O'Malley cancelled Mr Goodman's export credit insurance cover amid revelations of irregularities in the now defunct insurance scheme.

The scheme was set up to protect beef exporters doing business with Middle East countries.

However, Mr O'Malley discovered that the value of insurance cover provided exceeded the value of beef exported from Ireland, leading to the conclusion that beef from abroad was being put through the scheme at the expense of the Irish taxpayer.

The irregularities were one of the issues investigated by the World In Action TV programme that led to the setting up of the Beef Tribunal in 1991, which contributed substantially to the collapse of the Fianna Fáil-PD coalition in 1992.