Langford ensures €180k FBD project is complete

MORE than a year after stepping down as chief executive, Andrew Langford is due to leave insurer FBD at the end of this month. Langford has been working for the company on a €16,300-a-month contract since February 1. His deal expires on December 31.

Chairman Michael Berkery told shareholders at the last agm that Langford was working on a satellite project when he resigned, and that the board had agreed to keep it going. Berkery said he believed the project had commercial benefit and that Langford was the right person to lead it. Then he said the mystery project would be wrapped up if Langford found full-time employment elsewhere.

Berkery didn’t reveal the precise nature of the project, and nor would Langford’s successor Fiona Muldoon when asked. Well, it turns out the project was “strategic market research”, according to an FBD spokesman.

He said Langford’s work would be completed this month and that the company didn’t envisage renewing Langford’s contract. The total fee was just shy of €180,000.

Nice work if you can get it.

BRAZILIAN company JBS’s short-lived plan to locate a new headquarters in Ireland is well and truly over. The meat giant, which owns Moy Park and counts Cork man Jeremiah O’Callaghan among its executives, caused a flurry of excitement in May by indicating it would create JBS Foods International, an Ireland-based company which would oversee international operations. However, that was called off in October when a major investor opposed the plan. It said last week that it would list subsidiary JBS Foods International in US in the first six months of 2017.

But under this latest plans, operations currently based in the Netherlands will be responsible for managing all of the company’s international operations.

There has been speculation that the JBS could simply be a brass plate in Ireland or that it could herald a new push into the Irish beef market. As it turns out, the company has gone Dutch.