PARIS, Dec 22 (Reuters) - The founder of a French firm at the centre of an international breast implants scare is a former butcher who sought to corner the lucrative cosmetic surgery market with aggressive pricing, according to one plastic surgeon who knew him.
Jean-Claude Mas, who started the now defunct Poly Implant Prothese (PIP) in 1991 in the Mediterranean town of La Seyne-Sur-Mer, has disappeared from public view as anxiety about the potential health effects of his implant products has spread around the globe.
Up to 90 percent of PIP's sales went abroad, mostly to Latin America and Western Europe.
A lawyer for the septuagenarian Mas was not immediately available for comment.
"No-one knows where he is. He has sort of disappeared," said Patrick Baraf, a plastic surgeon in Paris who says he first met Mas in 1981 but never used his implants because of concern over their low prices.
"He was not from a medical background. He was not a medical engineer. He was a butcher, selling ham and sausage, before he started this line of work, which ... doesn't mean you are qualified to manufacture breast implants," said Baraf.
PIP shut last year amid concerns that an unusually high number of its implants had ruptured. An investigation found the company had used sub-standard silicone in its implants.
Anxiety has been fanned by reports in France of eight cases of cancer in women with breast implants made by PIP, which is accused of using industrial-grade silicone normally used in anything from computers to cookware.
Baraf said Mas sought to take over a large share of the European market in the 1990s by aggressively marketing his product and offering cut-throat prices.
"The most expensive implants go up to 1,200 euros and he was down at 250 euros," said Baraf. "He was marketing implants at a very low price, and for a low price you get low quality."
"When you know the cost of doing the (quality control) tests you cannot understand how he can sell these implants at such a very low price."
However, Alfred Fitoussi, spokesman for the breast and cancer section of the French Association of Plastic Surgery, said that initially much of the production from PIP's plant was "very good".
Only a fraction of PIP's implants were found to have been using sub-standard silicone, perhaps one-fifth, he said.
"In 2001, 2002, 2003, the production was good but a time came, in 2004-2005, when he started to make a certain part of the production with worse quality gel," he said. (Reporting by Daniel Flynn; Editing by Andrew Heavens)
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