Inventor alleges business partner trying to claim ownership of ‘holy grail’ material

An inventor has claimed in the High Court that a company he set up with a businessman is seeking to assert ownership over a formulation he created for the world’s first cement free concrete products.
Christopher Vickers, who is a chemist by profession, says he invented the formulation which he says is something of a “holy grail” in terms of the need to transition to more sustainable lower carbon products compared to traditional and standard products.
He says he and John McCann, who he said he knew as a developer with significant assets before the crash in 2008 and whose business had entered Nama, agreed to enter business together with both investing in a company called Creekmount Ltd. Mr McCann would invest just over €1 million and Mr Vickers a quarter of a million. Mr Vickers said he eventually invested €420,000.
He recently discovered the formula for cement-free products and after he refused to sign a shareholders’ agreement giving him just 30 per cent when he asked for 40 per cent, he was excluded from the business he helped set up.
On Friday, Mr Justice Brian Cregan granted barrister Anthony Thuillier, for Mr Vickers, a temporary injunction restraining Creemount Ltd, of Coes Road Business Park, Dundalk, Co Louth, from disclosing or publishing any confidential information or data in relation to a cement-free formulation of Mr Vickers’ and his company Ashtec IP Services Ltd. The case comes back next week.
Mr Vickers said in an affidavit that the agreed initial split between them was 70 per cent for McCann and 30 per cent for Vickers.
He said while he, Mr Vickers, became a director of Creekmount, Mr McCann held his interest through corporate entities he controlled and his daughter Shannen, his business associate John Kerr and his accountant Eugene O’Boyle, were nominated to act on his behalf. Mr McCann was the “real” majority shareholder in Creekmount, he said.
Creekmount built a plant in Dundalk which was to produce, Mr Vickers said, products that were still cement-based but more environmentally sustainable and competitive. The plant went into operation last March after, Mr Vickers said, more than a year-and-a-half of him doing the work to get it up and running, such as dealing with planning issues and suppliers.
During this time, Mr Vickers said he was also working from the premises of his own company, Ashtec, in Newtownmountkennedy, to come up with a cement free formula. He said he told Mr McCann he was doing so.
Last January, he received a positive testing result from an independent UK lab which confirmed he now had the world’s first cement free formulation. In February, he again asked Mr McCann to increase his shareholding in Creekmount to 40 per cent but he was not happy to do so.
Mr Vickers said Mr McCann had agreed a 50/50 share of the global intellectual property (IP) rights to the formula.
The manufacture of cement free products started in March comprising adhesives, floor levelling compounds and grouts, he said.
Mr Vickers believes there was no intention on the part of Mr McCann “to ever confer additional rights on me, or to agree terms in respect of the global IP rights, were I to permit the company to use Ashtec’s cement free formula”.
He also believes that by insisting he only get 30 per cent, the defendant is trying to engineer a situation where it may assert rights over the formulations.
He said he has also been told by one of Creekmount’s employees that Mr McCann’s people are trying to “crack the code” of the formulations now that Mr Vickers has gone.
A former MD of a major competitor, he said, was at the Dundalk plant on October 8th last. There was no reason for this unless it was for the purpose of selling the product and/or the plant to the competitor, he said.
He remains the person who knows the formula and while Creekmount has a significant amount of knowhow through “recipes” held on computer, the company is trying to source an expert chemist to help them make the products.