Two Irish businessmen have put together a £45 million acquisition of the European packaging arm of the Moore Corporation.

Moore, a Canadian-based group, has operations worldwide and its major products include business forms and labels.

Corporate financier Mr Conor Donnelly and Mr Patrick Crean, former Adare Group operations director, are believed to have taken a 50 per cent stake in the new company. The remainder is held by venture capital company Alchemy Partners and Chase Capital, the venture capital wing of Chase Bank.

The operations they are buying include all Moore's business forms and labels activities in France, England, Ireland, Belgium, Sweden, Norway, Portugal and Switzerland. These operations employ 1,500 people and had sales of $190 million (£134 million) last year.

The company employs only one person in the Republic and two in the North, but according to Mr Donnelly, Moore is very well-known in the printing industry for its magnetic strip manufacturing capabilities. Iarnrod Eireann rail tickets are among the products it manufactures. It also makes the business forms used for tracking parcels delivered by companies such as DHL.

Mr Donnelly (45) will become executive chairman of the company which will trade as Moore Paragon. He trained as a chartered accountant with KPMG, and subsequently became chief executive of Catoctin, a company with an annual turnover of $400 million. It is based in Virginia, USA, and is owned by the Firestone family.

He later returned to Ireland to set up the Donnelly & Partners accountancy firm where he handled a number of transactions for Adare. These included turning around Darley Business Forms, Waddington Business Forms and Kalamazoo Security Print which Adare had acquired.

Mr Donnelly worked with Mr Patrick Crean (35) at Adare. Mr Crean was one of Adare's founding management members and has 18 years experience in the printing business, mainly with the Clondalkin Group. He will take over as chief executive of Moore Paragon.

The Moore Corporation is currently undergoing a major restructuring programme which will generate annual savings in excess of $120 million and it is set to concentrate more on its North American business. "Moore's recent financial results have been unacceptable due to the lagging performance of our forms and labels business," Moore's chief executive Mr Ed Tyler said in a recent statement on group strategy. Mr Donnelly said he felt very fortunate that the group was able to acquire a company with such depth of experience in the printing business. He said the business would require some job reductions, but he was confident that its performance and profits could be improved.

He said the financial backing would give the management team the opportunity to realise Moore Paragon's full potential. Moore Paragon and Moore have also entered a reciprocal agreement to share their research and development and satisfy sales requirements.