Ryan has not paid his staff since April. On 30 April, he emailed staff suggesting that "everyone cease working for Gatsby" until he was in a position to pay their salaries. The company was hoping to find a new investor to merge its two magazines and restart the Irish gossip site Blogorrah. com.

Ryan's previous enterprises, GI magazine and Stars on Sunday, both collapsed. He left for New York three years ago and established New York Dog and Hollywood Dogmagazines in a blaze of publicity.

Janice Ridge, who worked as an advertising executive at the magazine, told the Sunday Tribune she is owed $12,500.

"I have tried to contact him [Ryan] repeatedly to get some kind of response to get paid even a portion, " Ridge said. Recalling one request for payment, she said: "I had asked for payment based on prepaid advertising we had sold . . . a little over $10,000. We asked for our base pay, what we were owed.

His response to me was he was sorry, his rent needed to be paid and he had bills to be paid."

Ridge claims two members of staff were evicted from their apartments when they couldn't afford to pay rent.

Michael O'Doherty, publisher of VIPmagazine and 50% stake-holder in the dog magazines, told the Sunday Tribune that although he has been in contact with Ryan, he has not been involved in the day-to-day running of the company since December 2005.

"I am to a degree in the dark myself, " he said.

"The problems of the company are the problems of a million companies. The fact that Gatsby owes money to people is simply not news."

Ridge was puzzled by claims that the reasons for the collapse of the magazine was non-payment of advertising, saying that nearly all of the advertising sold was pre-paid.

She was sceptical of some of the reasons Ryan gave for the magazine's problems, such as a pet food recall and advertisers pulling from the magazine.

"It's just not right to diss on the very people that were supporting the magazine. No pet food companies pulled their ads from him. I cannot understand his reasoning there.

"I look at it this way: John's living somehow, he's paying his bills somehow." Ridge queried why assets of Gatsby could not be sold off to pay the staff.