Analysis: The opening elements of the evidence of DCC chief executive Jim Flavin yesterday served to emphasise how far back you could look when putting this case in context.
Mr Flavin has spent much of his life interested in finance and the stock market, and the bulk of his professional life building up DCC plc.
He founded the company in the 1970s and built it into a listed company with a market capitalisation of €1.45 billion.
Born in Dublin in 1942, he attended Blackrock College, and, when he left, got a job in the head office of the National Bank (now part of AIB). While working in the bank for four-and-a-half years, he studied for a diploma and then a BComm degree in UCD.
After graduation he served his articles and became a chartered accountant. Armed with this qualification, he joined Allied Irish Investment Bank, and within a year was made head of its venture capital business.
In 1976 he resigned, and, with contacts in Dublin, London and Edinburgh, raised IR£970,000 (€1.2 million) which he used to set up Development Capital Corporation, a venture capital company that in time would evolve into DCC plc, an industrial holding company.
He was, he told Mr Kevin Feeney SC, for the defendants, always a pretty independent sort of person. He also said he was always interested in the markets, and bought his first shares when only 19 years old.
In the minutes of his evidence, he pointed out that in 1999 he was invited by the government to become a director of Telecom Éireann, which was then being prepared for flotation.
He served as deputy chairman of Eircom and was its senior independent director up to the time of its buyout by the Valentia consortium.
Flavin is a bona fide member of the Irish blue-chip businessmen's club, and has a long way to fall if the mammoth insider dealing case goes against him.
Likewise, his relationship with Fyffes and the McCann family goes back a long way.
The DCC investment in Fyffes (then Fruit Importers of Ireland) was made in 1981 and Flavin was on the company's board from then up until the time of the trades in February 2000 that are at the heart of this case.
DCC was involved in giving advice to the Irish fruit company when it was buying London-based Fyffes, from Chiquita, in 1986. Flavin and Mr Neil McCann travelled to the US when the deal was being negotiated.
DCC sponsored Fyffes' flotation on the Dublin and London exchanges. Although a non-executive director, Flavin devoted a significant amount of his time to the company.
"I was in regular, if not daily, contact" with Fyffes in the 1980s, he told the court.
The relationship with the McCanns began to sour in the 1990s. DCC changed its strategy, and its ownership of a 10 per cent plus stake in Fyffes became an anomaly.
Also, Flavin began to develop concerns about the McCann family's control over what was now a public company.
Neil McCann had consolidated the Irish fruit sector and then gone on to build his company into a player on the world stage.
"Throughout the 1980s, Fyffes was seen as the business of the McCann family. This carried on into the 1990s when the McCann family only had a shareholding of 8.5 per cent in Fyffes, but the positions of executive chairman, executive deputy chairman and chief executive, were held by Neil McCann and his sons, Carl McCann and David McCann, for most of that period."
Flavin said he believed it would be better for Fyffes and its shareholders, including the McCanns, if the McCann family had less control over Fyffes.
He made it obvious yesterday that he has a very high regard for Neil McCann, but a difficult relationship with his two sons. In particular, he indicated he had a difficult relationship with Carl, the current Fyffes chairman.
Flavin said he pushed within the company for the establishment of a remuneration committee that would set pay levels for executives, including members of the McCann family. He said the McCanns came to view him as a "thorn in their sides".
He believes that his difficult relationship with the McCanns "provides part of the explanation for the timing, manner and mode of the prosecution of these proceedings".
