When the 190 partners at Goldman Sachs decided this week to float 10 to 15 per cent of the company, they did more than ensure a fantastically wealthy retirement for the most prominent Irishman among them, Peter Sutherland. They also placed his Goldman Sachs International at the centre of what is likely to be a rapid and ambitious expansion in Europe.

Yesterday, Mr Sutherland stood beside former Russian premier and possible future president, Viktor Chernomyrdin, and opened the new Goldman Sachs Moscow office. In the months ahead, with the company's capital base swollen by the flotation to well over $10 billion (£7 billion), the suave Dubliner can expect to cut many more ribbons, and many more deals in Europe.

Although he created a stir by becoming a partner in the firm, as well as chairman and managing director of Goldman Sachs International in July 1995, Mr Sutherland has rarely been far from the public eye during the last 20 years.

First a talented young lawyer, then Attorney General for two terms under Garret FitzGerald, he became European Commissioner with responsibility for competition policy, social affairs, education and relations with the European Parliament. A committed European, he later emerged as a possible candidate to succeed Jacques Delors as Commission president.

Mr Sutherland was the last director general of the General Agreement of Tariffs and Trade (GATT) steering the far-reaching Uruguay Round to a conclusion before founding the World Trade Organisation (WTO) and becoming its first director-general.

He has served as chairman of Allied Irish Banks, president of the Irish Bankers' Federation, was the first non-Swede to be appointed to the board of Ericsson, and was the first non-US citizen on the Delta Air Lines board. He is now chairman of oil giant BP.

Few business people get to shape their own working environment in the way that Mr Sutherland has. As EC Commissioner, he strove for greater economic and monetary union, while as head of the WTO he oversaw the delegations of 124 countries as they moved towards signing the 22,000-page trade agreement.

Now, as Goldman Sachs eyes the most liberalised and unified market Europe has ever seen, he will reap the rewards.

"There is a huge challenge in Europe, because the likelihood is that with the euro, a new European capital market is going to develop both in equities and in fixed income products across borders, across the whole euro area," he says.

In the past, he notes, there was a far greater need to use distribution in the US to tap capital markets, but the European market has been stimulated by the rolling programme of privatisations adopted by many governments.

"It has created a shareholder mentality in Europe which never existed before," he adds.

Few would deny that Europe holds enormous potential for merchant banks. In the past six years there have been 7,200 Initial Public Offerings in the US, compared to just 700 in the same period in Europe.

"The euro will be an enormous stimulant for activity and for investment banks in Europe," he says.

Goldman Sachs has already taken part in several major retail banking deals within Europe, as major players in that sector jostle or position ahead of EMU. The company is understood to be working quietly on several more to be announced later in the year.

With the euro creating and stimulating a real European capital market, and the economies of central and eastern Europe kicking in, Goldman Sachs can expect to find many opportunities to use some of the cash released by the flotation.

That move to float part of the firm will also mean paper gains of many millions of dollars some reports have said up to $100 million for individual partners such as Mr Sutherland.

In theory, he admits, this will make him fantastically wealthy. In practice, he says, the individual figures have been wildly exaggerated, and anyway, there is no question of anyone cashing in their shares.

"I don't know how it will work out, I've only been there a couple of years I genuinely have no idea what the personal implications are, and I couldn't care less," he says.

It is clear already from the Goldman Sachs headquarters in New York that partners will have to hold onto their shares, possibly for several years. In this way, the value of the flotation to individuals will be determined not by the immediate share price, but by the performance and share price of the company in future years.

If he is lucky, Mr Sutherland will find when the time finally comes to convert his shares, they are actually worth far more than his initial paper gains.