Yesterday an American academic and former chief economist to the US Securities and Exchange Commission not only told the Fyffes/DCC hearing that information Mr Jim Flavin had in early 2000 was price sensitive, he priced the sensitivity of the information.

Prof Kenneth Lehn is the Samuel A McCullough professor of finance at the University of Pittsburgh. The first appendix of his 23-page report for Fyffes contains his 10-page CV.

The cases he has given testimony at during the last four years include the MCI/Worldcom bankruptcy case in New York in 2003, and the Sylvia Allen vs RJ Reynolds and Philip Morris case in Miami, in 2002, where the wife of a deceased smoker tried unsuccessfully to sue the two tobacco companies.

Prof Lehn worked out the relationship he said existed between Fyffes's after tax profits and the value of its stock (he came up with an estimated coefficient of 14.89). He then looked at the trading information which Mr Jim Flavin had in his possession in January 2000.

The information Mr Flavin and the other Fyffes directors had indicated a shortfall of €13.7 million for the first quarter of 2000 (November 1999 to January 2000), so Prof Lehn assumed the first half figure would be down by the same amount. Applying the coefficient to the €13.7 million figure, he came up with a share price drop of 62 cent per share, or 18.6 per cent.

This drop would have occurred on February 2nd, 2000, if the allegedly price-sensitive information had been released to the market on that date. The DCC sales began on February 3rd and netted the company €106 million. "This estimate implies that by trading on this information, DCC avoided a loss of at least €19.3 million." Other ways of doing the sum can lead to the figure being increased to €26.2 million, he said.

He also said the figures were conservative and that post the release of the negative trading information, DCC would have had difficulty offloading its stock.

Mr Michael Cush SC, for DCC, suggested to Prof Lehn that much of the content of the negative information contained in the trading statements available to Mr Flavin in February 2000 was already "generally known" to the market. It knew about the trading difficulties of other fruit companies, of exchange rate difficulties and of banana pricing difficulties.

However, Prof Lehn said knowing the price of crude oil did not let you estimate the profits of ExxonMobil. There were too many variables that were unknown to persons outside a company, he said.

Prof Lehn also said the profit warning issued by Fyffes on March 20th, 2000, was similar in "tone" to the numerical information contained in the allegedly price-sensitive information. Fyffes share price dropped by 18.2 per cent on March 20th, and had dropped by a total of 25.5 per cent by the end of March 21st.

Prof Lehn was asked by Mr Paul Sreenan SC, for Fyffes, about the view due to be expressed by experts for DCC that the share price drop on March 20th was due to the "bursting" of the dotcom bubble. The professor said the idea was "preposterous".

On March 20th, 2000, people were still reasonably optimistic about the internet, he said. He showed a graph of the Fyffes share price movement on the day. The profit warning was issued at 12.15 p.m. The price had been level through trades up to that time, a sudden drop occurred immediately after 12.15 pm, and then the price levelled out through trades from about 12.20 p.m. on to the close of trade.

The data "indisputably" linked the share price drop to the profit warning, he said.