A former employee of Teknosoft-Tata-Consultancy paid Sfr10,000 (£4400) for the central matching engine and other intellectual assets of the bankrupt trade processing utility GSTP at a public auction in Zurich last week.
Sources say the buyer was the sole bidder for the GSTP's Transaction Flow Manager technology.
Creditors to the consortium will be distressed at the lack of value attached to the GSTP's much-vaunted central matching engine. When investors called a halt to further funding of the GSTP back in November 2002 after disappointing take-up by buy-side asset managers, it was assumed that the core technology assets of the utility would fetch a multi-million dollar sum.
However, wrangling over intellectual property rights and the effort involved in collecting and collating the distributed software, which was housed at multiple sites, slowed down proceedings. In the eighteen months that it took to administrate and assemble the available assets for sale, the markets had moved on.
Last week's public auction represented a last-ditch attempt to rescue some value from the venture for creditors after an earlier deadline passed in April with no firm bids on the table. It is understod that the eventual buyer - a former member of the Accumatch consortium that built the system - was bidding for sentimental reasons and has no firm plans to commercialise the technology.