Shiel to receive £2m from 25% share offering

Mr Patrick Shiel, co-founder and chief executive officer of Flexicom, is set to become the latest recruit to the ranks of Ireland's high-tech millionaires.

Mr Shiel established the company with Dr John Clarke, its chief technical officer, in 1993 and the two stand to share a payout of around £2 million from the £7 million the company hopes to raise when it floats up to 25 per cent of its shares.

Mr Shiel, who holds a 70 per cent stake in Flexicom, will receive the larger sum, which is likely to be worth some £1.7 million, while Dr Clarke, who currently holds a 12 per cent stake, will make some £300,000 from the share offering.

Following the listing on the DCM and AIM, Mr Shiel will still own around 53 per cent of the company, while Dr Clarke will hold just over 9 per cent.

Around 10 per cent of the company's share capital was assigned to staff and management through an employee share option programme, but this will now fall to 7.5 per cent. Forbairt, which holds a 7 per cent stake in the company, will see this diluted to 5.25 per cent.

Mr Shiel graduated with a first class honours degree in electronic engineering from Trinity College Dublin in 1982. He spent the next six years working in California with a number of electronics companies including Trilogy Systems, Stanford Research International and Altera Corporation which floated on the Nasdaq in 1988.

"A lot of our management policies and beliefs are based on a more American model of management," he says of Flexicom.

After his stint in the US, he joined Trintech, the Irish manufacturer of payment card terminals, as design engineering manager and later became technical director, responsible for all product development and implementation programmes.

In 1993, he founded Flexicom with Dr Clarke, a computer and electronic engineering graduate of TCD with a PhD in artificial intelligence. He is now responsible for the strategic direction of the firm's technology and software design methods.