Why did Goodman lend £25m to a shy farmer?

LAST Tuesday, just as the Taxing Master was issuing his findings that Goodman International and Mr Larry Goodman were entitled to £6.7 million in legal costs for the beef tribunal, the High Court was also giving judgment in another Goodman case. The contrast between the two could not have been greater.

In the first case, the keynote was a rigorous determination to watch every penny. In the second, it was a bizarre and still mysterious gamble with a huge amount of money in which £25 million slipped out of Mr Goodman's hands.

When it came to getting money from the public purse by way of legal costs, no detail was too trivial to be itemised. Buying a video tape for £15, spending £24 on two official reports, £2.50 for material from the Central Statistics Office, £20 for photocopying and phone calls in a solicitor's office all were claimed successfully from the taxpayer.

The second case, however, suggested a starkly different attitude to money. At its core was the decision in March 1990 by a Goodman company, for reasons yet to be fully explained, to lend £22.83 million sterling, without security, to a reclusive Tipperary farmer, Mr Joe Kenny. Mr Kenny, a father of seven in his early fifties, has a 100 acre dairy farm near Roscrea. In spite of having left school without a secondary education, he has a second career as a property investor and business consultant.

In a statement in September 1990, Mr Larry Goodman said he had never met or spoken to Mr Kenny, nor to Mr Des Lamont, the financial adviser who introduced Mr Kenny to the Goodman group. Yet Mr Goodman lent Mr Kenny a vast sum of money without any real security.

In the High Court on Tuesday, Mr Justice Kinlen ordered Mr Kenny to repay this sum to Mr Goodman and his company Anglo Irish Beef Processors (AIBP), but the money is currently frozen in a bank account in Cyprus. The judge remarked "It is intriguing to wonder why Mr Goodman either as principal or agent lent £22.8 million sterling without security and the defendant [Mr Kenny] facilitated the transfer of at least part of it to a South African Cypriot. However, these interesting queries are not before this court."

NEITHER have the same intriguing questions been answered in previous actions. The so called "Cyprus loan" was originally included in the list of issues to be dealt with by the beef, tribunal, but was dropped because it was judged to be a private rather than a public issue.

Last year Mr Goodman failed in a High Court action seeking damages from Mr Des Lamont, the broker who introduced Mr Kenny to the then group treasurer of AIBP. That case made it clear that Mr Lamont had acted in good faith as "introductory agent" and supported his company's claim that its executives "were at no stage aware of the ultimate objective of the transaction or the subsequent destination of the money concerned".

The initial facts are relatively simple. The Goodman company ABP Holdings borrowed £25 million from Barclays Bank and then lent it to Mr Kenny in the belief that it would be repaid in three months, with a profit to Goodman of £2.4 million. In theory, the security for the loan was the title deeds for a £25 million property portfolio held by another bank, Mercantile Credit, on Mr Joe Kenny's behalf. In fact, there was no such security.

The money went from Mr Kenny to an account in Guernsey held by a sometime business partner of his, Mr Andreas Kittalides, a Cypriot business man with offices in London, Cyprus and Johannesburg. From there, it went to the London account of a company called City Project Financiers.

This company is controlled by Mr Kittalides, but it also had links back to Mr Kenny, through his associate, the parish priest of Shinrone, Co Offaly, Father Frank Bergin. In 1992, Father Bergin told the Observer that he made "high return investments" with Mr Kenny, to whom he is related by marriage, to raise money for the parish.

At least £500,000 flowed between Father Bergin's account with Allied Irish Bank and City Project in 1989 and 1990, with one transfer of £216,076 and another of £185,000 going to City Project, and transfers of £25,000, £25,035 and £50,007 going back to Father Bergin.

THIS last payment was made just after the Goodman loan. There is no suggestion of any wrong doing on Father Bergin's part, and he seems to have been entirely ignorant of the larger picture. He told the Observer. "When this thing with Mr Goodman blew up, it was out of the blue. I had no idea there were these connections. I said to Mr Kenny. `What have you been up to?' He said. `Maybe some of the money you have is from that source'. I said I wanted nothing in the world to do with it ... and I gave it back."

At this stage, about £3 million of the total sum was taken from the City Project account. Half of this was paid to a Nigerian businessman, Mr Akupuru Uche' Samson, apparently as part of an oil investment deal. That deal, collapsed, however, when Dr Samson was arrested and charged with "collaborating with foreign associates to defraud the federal government".

The rest of the money, £19.9 million sterling, was transferred via Luxembourg to a Bank of Cyprus account held by Mr Kittalides and his father. In 1992, the Observer claimed that, unknown to Mr Goodman, this money was intended for use in a complex deal involving the buying and selling of East German currency through South Africa.

In May 1990, however, a South African businessman, Mr Graham Hauptman, asked the Cypriot courts to freeze the account, claiming that he was the rightful owner of the money. The following July, Goodman International, which should have been repaid its £25 million on June 13th, took a court action to freeze the Bank of Cyprus account. That action was ultimately successful and the account has been frozen since September 1990.

In spite of winning his case in Dublin this week, Mr Goodman now has to go back to the Cypriot courts to try to have the money from the frozen account returned to him and his companies. Mr Kittalides has stated that he will not return the money to Mr Goodman unless he is paid £4.8 million he claims to be owed from previous "wheels and deals I have done with Mr Goodman".

Mr Goodman, for his part, will almost certainly contest such allegations in the Cypriot courts. That case may at last provide some insight into a very strange saga of high finance.