KEY POINTS:
Medical entrepreneur Dr Tony Bierre doesn't like to dwell on his messy departure from the long-established Auckland laboratory service which his new company aims to replace.
"To rehash events of 2002 now is not relevant. I've moved on," he told the Weekend Herald.
Although some who have worked with Dr Bierre are impressed by skills such as his business nous and his ability to work in a team, a four-year-old legal ruling gives a different perspective on the pathologist.
Dr Bierre was an Auckland District Health Board member before he resigned last August to set up Labtests Auckland.
Board colleague Dr Ian Scott recalls Dr Bierre, a political rival at the 2004 elections, as a team player: "The whole of the board plays very well as a team and he fitted in with that. He is an astute, capable and intelligent man."
Jackie Blue, a former board member and now National MP, offered just one view on Dr Bierre: "He's a very charming and intelligent individual."
But the picture that emerges from the 2003 Employment Relations Authority ruling, which rejected Dr Bierre's claim of constructive dismissal, is of a difficult, complaining employee.
He had in 2002 offered his resignation from Diagnostic Medlabs (DML), but he then sought, unsuccessfully, to have it withdrawn.
DML is the company that Dr Bierre's Labtests Auckland will supplant on July 1 - unless the High Court overturns Labtests' eight-year, $560 million, taxpayer-funded contract.
Authority member Rosemary Monaghan spoke of the relationship breakdown that preceded Dr Bierre's departure, commenting that he was "far from blameless" and that he had made an unreasonable, destructive accusation regarding a colleague's knowledge of pathology qualifications.
Ms Monaghan noted that Dr Bierre "was not prepared to listen to other points of view with any great degree of open mindedness".
He was ordered to pay $15,000 costs but appealed and the matter was settled out of court.
Dr Bierre hinted that "significant evidence" obtained from DML had influenced the outcome in his favour, but said the settlement terms were confidential - apart from an agreement modifying DML's two-year restraint-of-trade restriction on him.
In the High Court, he dismissed as "simply untrue" the claim that setting up Labtests and winning the contract was revenge for his treatment by DML.
Dr Bierre, a specialist pathologist for 23 years, started lecturing part-time at Auckland Medical School in 2004. He had found it hard to obtain a pathology job and, suspecting DML was bad-mouthing him, he took consultancy jobs outside Auckland.
But he concluded that setting up his own business was the way forward, honing his commercial skills in a Master of Business Administration course, completed in 2004.
He is now putting those skills into practice as an investor in and chief executive of Labtests, which is majority-owned by Australian company Healthscope.
In his MBA he examined market "distortions" in community laboratories, and a philosophy of "lean thinking" which he intends to apply.
"It came out of Toyota manufacturing," he told the Listener.
TONY BIERRE - THE CV
* Qualifications: BSc, MB ChB, FRCPA, MBA.
* Specialist pathologist, former part-time senior lecturer at the University of Auckland School of Medicine, president of the Auckland Division of the NZ Medical Association.
* Age 53, married, four children.
