Irish businessman Brian Maccaba is an unlikely Robert Redford, but court actions in London have highlighted allegations, which are strongly denied, that he offered $1 million for another man's wife, reports Karlin Lillington
While the Irish technology industry has a few characters, none has previously ignited the tabloids or seized the headlines because of the quirks and fascinations of his or her private life.
Then along came Brian Maccaba, a highly successful but heretofore innocuously quiet Irish businessman, in the news for allegedly offering $1 million for another man's wife, which he denies, in what has inevitably been described widely as a real-life version of the film Indecent Proposal.
And it gets stranger, as it turns out that this charge is just a part of a labyrinthine story of accusation and counter-accusation involving ultra-orthodox Jewish law, key figures in the top tiers of London's Jewish community, and angry charges of libel and slander.
How in the world did Maccaba find himself in the public eye like this? The media exposure of the Irish software company chief executive would in the past have been limited to pleasant profiles in business publications. Any excitement came from the fact that his Irish-based company, Cognotec, had received an impressive $40 million in funding from high-profile Japanese venture investment bank Softbank, and $20 million from Warburg Pincus. The only unusual bit of information in any profile piece was a reference to Maccaba's conversion to Judaism 13 years ago.
But now he has been emblazoned on the public mind in rather gobsmacking detail after newspapers last week published bits of a handwritten letter to a London couple, in which Maccaba is alleged to offer "a golden key" of $1 million to the husband to "set free" his wife. This "key", says the letter, would enable the husband to return to his "bachelor life" while freeing the wife - a teacher in a London Jewish school with whom it is said Maccaba had become infatuated - to join Maccaba.
The letter, headed "Knocking on Heaven's Door", is now an exhibit in a high court defamation case in Britain, brought by senior rabbinical judge Dayan Yaakov Yisrael Liechtenstein. Liechtenstein is disputing Maccaba's claims that Liechtenstein spread malicious rumours about Maccaba's sexual life.
The suits and counter-suits began a year ago, when Maccaba accused Liechtenstein of attempting to solicit a $100,000 bribe from him in order to confer the prestigious title of "dayan" on Maccaba's friend, Rabbi Moshe Cohen, of the Hechal Leah Synagogue in London. Cohen filed supporting documentation for the case.
The suit also states that Liechtenstein tried to solicit another $100,000 bribe from Maccaba, as a payment to an Israeli political figure.
On top of this, Liechtenstein is alleged to have spread sexual smears about Maccaba to senior members of Britain's Jewish community. Maccaba is himself a prominent member of that community, financing projects such as the school at which the "golden key" woman teaches. His political connections also extend to the top echelons of British society: Maccaba is said to have arranged for meetings in Downing Street between Tony Blair and Israeli politicians.
Though the original suit was filed in Britain last June and, even then, contained accusations of sexual scandal, it was only with the publication of the $1 million letter that the whole tangled affair was thrust into the public spotlight.
Though Maccaba is well-known within British circles, he seems to be something of an enigma within the Irish technology community. "He played his own game," says one industry executive.
Another claims that Maccaba was known to be "a leading light within the Jewish community in London". But beyond that, he seems to be a surprisingly unknown quantity, especially for someone who came through in the first, small circle of 1980s technology entrepreneurs to achieve enormous personal success.
The perceived aloofness is perhaps a consequence of his spending most of his time in Britain, and of devoting much of his free time to his deep personal involvement with the London Jewish community.
In his mid-40s, Maccaba was born Brian McCabe in Dublin, where he grew up in a close-knit Killiney family. He attended the Christian Brothers School in Monkstown, which he considered to be a great school that had "a strong formative influence" on his life, according to a lengthy interview he did with RTÉ in 2000.
After school, he attended UCD at night, studying for a BComm degree, while working as an executive officer in the Civil Service by day. After work in town, he would cycle to Belfield, where he says he got involved in the student newspaper and student politics, and became auditor of the commerce and economics society.
Just as he was finishing his degree, he got a position as an economist with the Confederation of Irish Industry, which helped him finance a masters degree at the London School of Economics. He feels the international perspective he gained there "helped me look at Ireland in a different way".
The Ireland of the time was in the economic doldrums, which spurred Maccaba to head out on his own as an entrepreneur. "I don't think I became an entrepreneur primarily to make money," he has said. He liked the difficult challenge of setting up a business in Ireland - it was "tremendously motivational", he told RTÉ.
He has also said he was "always an activist, and very into the Irish language and culture, for example". He took Irish language courses and enjoyed writing poetry in Irish. Eventually, he changed his name from Brian McCabe to Briain Maccaba or Macaba, though he seems now to go by the Anglo-Irish blend, Brian Maccaba.
He made a first foray into the technology sector that would ultimately make his fortune - real-time financial information - in the early 1980s, though several companies he was involved with ultimately failed to match up to his hopes for them.
In the early 1990s, he set up Cognotec, a business that quickly took advantage of the fledgling Internet to provide automated financial trading. The venture was highly risky, but it had become a solid success by the time the end-of-century boom got going. The company was winning plaudits and Maccaba was named as one of the 30 most important figures in Internet finance by Institutional Investor magazine. He had hoped to float the company by 2001, but the global economic downturn halted those plans.
Maccaba has said his conversion to Judaism caused a serious rift in his family for a long time. But it was an extremely important personal step for him. He read more than 200 books on the subject before converting, and has said he related very closely to the religion.
Married twice, Maccaba has six children, two raised as Catholics and four raised as Jews.
One of the State's true technology pioneers, the soft-spoken, very private Maccaba was interviewed many times in the Celtic Tiger period of robust economic growth. Then, people were interested in his financial success. Now, he must find the current focus on his private life extremely awkward.
He concluded his RTÉ interview in 2000 by saying he felt the Republic was a less pleasant and friendly place than it had been when the country was poorer. Asked by interviewer Shane Kenny "are we nastier now?", he paused, then said: "We probably are."