At War with the Bank Spotlight

Meteor Electrical had 200 people working.

We had 45 lorries on the road.

Can you remember the day you decided to throw the towel in?

I try very hard not to remember it.

See them last few months, you know,

when the house goes back on the line,

everything goes back on the line,

you're using your credit cards

to try to get money for wages.

So far, so familiar.

A once-thriving business going under in the recession.

But this is a story with a difference.

Because what happened next between this man and his bank

has been captured on secret video recordings.

I am sure they have hundreds and hundreds of customers

making allegations. But I am not making allegations,

there is video evidence of their people

doing what they employed them to do.

We've looked at hours of footage, which we're broadcasting tonight

for the very first time.

Really quite extraordinary, wasn't it?

It's bank officials recorded on tape doing something that clearly

they shouldn't have been doing.

It's lethal. It's dynamite.

We haven't seen anything like it before.

That bit of video footage is the only thing that separates me

from hundreds of others, because, like, nobody would believe

if I was trying to tell that story.

This programme contains strong language.

MAN LAUGHS

-How are you?

-How are things?

-Not so bad.

You're taking my hand, eh?

John Conway's electrical supplies company used to sponsor

the Derry City football team.

Where's my onions? No onions?

How are you? Healthy eating(!)

These days, he and his sons attend matches

through the turnstiles, like everyone else.

There are no Meteor signs still round here.

At its height, John Conway's company, Meteor Controls,

had an annual turnover of £24 million.

He admits his company's financial difficulties began when

sterling collapsed seven years ago,

and that, coupled with a major recession

in the construction industry, threw his business into crisis.

Most of our purchases were in US dollar,

but most of our sales were in euro.

Sterling was in a nosedive and that

cost us an awful lot of money.

The odds were against him.

But Conway thinks his business might have survived

these catastrophic events if it hadn't been

for the added pressure from one bank

he did business with, the Bank of Ireland.

This wasn't the responsibility of the bank.

You know, the industry was tightening,

we had to keep cutting back so we remained profitable,

but it was this other stuff that was going on in the background,

the bank stuff, which was the stuff that, really, we couldn't manage.

Over 200 years ago, Bank of Ireland was founded

on the principle of supporting and guiding our customers.

We recognise that for the last few years, however,

the waters have been particularly stormy.

The bank may advertise their supporting role,

but John Conway says this wasn't his experience

when things got rough at Meteor.

You could never get money released.

Money would be sitting in the account, there was

a continuous thing of saying, "Yes, we will transfer 50,000 tomorrow."

The money wouldn't be transferred.

You couldn't get anybody on the phone,

they wouldn't answer the phone,

and then you'd get an apology the next day.

John Conway has shown us some of the e-mails exchanged between Meteor

and Bank of Ireland during the period before the company went to the wall.

They give a flavour of his frustration at cash-flow problems

caused by the bank,

a claim Bank of Ireland rejects.

Four payment requests last week not actioned.

I have been let down yet again by a transfer not going...

So here we have a bank - broke itself at this stage -

that, for whatever reason, was frequently missing deadlines

and holding on to what, to Meteor, were large amounts of cash,

making it even more difficult for a company

that was struggling to survive.

Tonight on Spotlight, we bring you the secret recordings

we had to fight in court to broadcast.

And we reveal an extraordinary battle

between businessman John Conway and his former bankers.

He secretly recorded tapes that he says expose how elements

within the Commercial Finance Department of Bank of Ireland

were willing to go to any lengths to claw back money for the bank,

including one employee attempting fraud.

The bank, in turn, accuse John Conway's firm of fraud.

So what do the tapes really reveal, and what do they show us about

how some Bank of Ireland officials operated behind closed doors?

MUFFLED VOICES IN FOOTAGE

John Conway believes that if he hadn't secretly recorded

Bank of Ireland employees after Meteor's collapse,

the subsequent criminal behaviour

he says he uncovered would never have come to light.

The Cookstown firm Meteor Electrical has ceased trading

with the loss of 70 jobs.

The company has gone into administration.

Meteor is Ireland's largest independent electrical wholesaler.

The downturn in the construction industry

and currency exchange rate problems have been blamed.

Managing director John Conway says he's been working to try

and find a way of overcoming the company's financial difficulties,

but he said a viable alternative...

So what impact will these job losses have on the town? The DUP...

When it closed in June 2009,

Meteor was owed nearly £3 million from customers.

Once the liquidator was in place, the Bank of Ireland,

with whom Meteor did most of its cash business,

sent in their own staff to try

and recoup the millions of pounds owed to Meteor,

and in turn to the bank.

This is Tony McCrory,

an ex-sales manager at Meteor who knew the books inside out.

He was brought back in to help the two women from the bank

navigate their way around the accounts.

From early on, he had misgivings.

When did you start to think,

"Hold on a minute, there's something not quite right"?

Erm... Well, pretty much straightaway, I mean,

after the first couple of days, there would be a few...

a few flippant remarks here and there,

a few things that you would think, "Mm, strange."

Further down the line, when it started to get probably dangerous,

I thought to myself,

"Gosh, what have I got myself involved with here?"

Given his experience of the bank, John Conway says

he was already suspicious about what the bank's employees would do.

He says Tony McCrory then came to him and appeared to confirm his fears.

At this point, John Conway decided to

record the Bank of Ireland staff as they worked on his premises.

I never recorded anybody in my life!

But I says, "I need to know what's going on here."

Spotlight has examined many hours of footage recorded by John Conway,

which give a fascinating insight into the practices

of the two employees from

the Commercial Finance Department of Bank of Ireland.

Tony, this is the actual footage of the conversations

in this very office between you and the two women involved.

Obviously, there's no-one here now, but it was here that it took place.

Here, in footage broadcast for the first time,

bank official Sarah Breen boasts to her colleague Kelley Toner

and to Tony McCrory about just how ruthless

they were prepared to be in collecting money.

KELLEY LAUGHS

SARAH AND KELLEY LAUGH

They claim they will stop at nothing

to recover money for the bank.

And they're clearly proud of how they are seen as an unstoppable duo

by others in their department.

Yet at times, they appear to have the leeway to help certain creditors.

But it's clear from the footage that there are certain debts

they won't let go of, particularly when they're dealing with

creditors they perceive to be disrespectful to them.

SHE LAUGHS

Clearly, it was in everyone's interest, including Meteor's,

for the bank to collect as much money as possible in this situation,

but what is surprising are the tactics the women appear to be

willing to use in order to do so.

John Conway says Kelley Toner's role quickly went

from debt collection to attempted fraud.

When she couldn't get the money from customers who owed it,

she tried to collect it from Meteor's bad debt insurance.

A lot of companies have a form of insurance called

"bad debt insurance", whereby if one of their customers can't pay,

they can claim the money from an insurance policy.

On tape, Kelley Toner divulges how she regularly made up

false information on insurance claims.

She admits to withholding information from insurers, and to telling lies.

One of the things Kelley Toner claims to have duped

the insurers about is that there had been court judgments

against customers in relation to money owed.

If there were such judgments in place,

the insurer would pay out much more readily.

Kelley Toner goes on to boast of misleading insurers

about important documents known as "proof of delivery" or PODs.

When insurers raised the fact that there were no PODs,

she assured them she had seen them, when she hadn't.

These tapes are clearly of serious concern.

Kelley Toner, who has since left Bank of Ireland,

took a legal injunction against both Spotlight and John Conway

to try to prevent the broadcast of the material.

But what is most concerning is another incident from the footage,

because it appears to show insurance fraud

being carried out by a bank employee.

We see Kelley Toner actually asking for Meteor's records to be

tampered with, in order to make a company

that didn't owe money look like it did.

Kelley Toner wants to put through an insurance claim

for over 12,000 euro for a customer

called Independent Electrical Wholesalers

based in Dublin, who she says owe this amount to Meteor.

The two companies had what's known as a "contra deal" in place,

which means they exchanged goods and services

without cash ever changing hands.

However, as her colleague Sarah Breen had pointed out to her

moments earlier, while Independent Electrical

had owed Meteor 12,964 euro in the past,

the Dublin company is in turn

owed 18,000 euro by Meteor,

and is therefore approximately

6,000 euro in credit.

Independent Electricals had provided 18,000 euro worth

of services to Meteor, which,

as Sarah Breen makes absolutely clear to Kelley Toner,

wiped out their 12,000 euro debt

and brought Independent Electrical 6,000 euro into credit.

Undeterred by Sarah Breen's warning, Kelley Toner then proceeds to ask

for part of Meteor's payment transaction history to be deleted

in order to try and claim the cash from an insurance company.

Kelley Toner is willing to tamper with the accounts

to fraudulently claim money for the bank.

She goes on to ask Tony McCrory to remove recent transactions

from the account history between Meteor and Independent Electrical.

SHE LAUGHS

Can you understand why some people might say,

"Well, this man Tony McCrory is captured on camera

"helping Kelley Toner to edit Meteor's credit history,

"is he not equally guilty of conspiring to mislead an insurer?

What was I getting out of it?

I wasn't getting anything out of it.

I was getting paid for a day's work,

to do there at the time.

I knew it was on the camera. I done nothing.

Look, I'll leave it up to the judgment of people at home.

I don't think anybody is going

to look at this and think I done something wrong.

I was made redundant at the time, in no small way

a contributing factor to the bank,

so I have absolutely no sympathy for them and my conscience is clear.

We showed the clip of Kelley Toner and Tony McCrory to Julian Radcliffe,

a specialist in fraud against insurance companies

who has acted as an expert witness in several international fraud cases.

This case was a classic where there was money owed both ways.

And what these people appear to be doing was trying to

cut off the record at a certain point, when there was money

which didn't suit them being owed in a direction

that didn't suit them.

It is very serious, because in an insolvency situation,

it's very important that the integrity of the accounting records

should be maintained.

Do you think it's attempted fraud?

In the insurance world, it would be considered fraudulent,

on the evidence that I've seen.

Then we showed the footage to Neil Swift,

a criminal lawyer who specialises in white-collar crime.

We asked him if he felt he would be able to

prosecute on the basis of the evidence we showed him.

-Yes, I certainly would.

-And on what grounds would you take the case?

There's definitely evidence that an offence of fraud has been committed.

There's evidence of dishonesty from the mouths of the people concerned,

there's direct evidence of doctoring a document,

and there's direct evidence of knowledge

of what the true situation is,

so...there appear to be sufficient evidence there to prosecute a fraud.

We asked Kelley Toner and the bank to give us their response to the tapes.

We asked them if they thought this kind of behaviour was acceptable

and whether it reflected the ethos of the bank.

We asked them if any investigations or disciplinary procedures had

been carried out within the bank on foot of their having seen the video.

In response, Bank of Ireland questioned the veracity,

reliability and truthfulness of the footage,

and said, in any case, it would not be appropriate

to comment on it, as it is currently the subject of legal proceedings

between Bank of Ireland and John Conway.

Kelley Toner tried to injunct this programme and failed.

Her lawyer subsequently told Spotlight that she...

She accepted that she made comments that were...

..but says she was goaded into making them by Tony McCrory.

She...

We also wrote to Sarah Breen, who did not reply.

John Conway says he asked a business associate to make senior figures

in the bank aware of the tapes soon after they were recorded.

The bank says John Conway has sought to make use of the tapes.

The existence of an outstanding personal guarantee owed to the bank

by John Conway is a source of a bitter dispute between them.

Viewed in this light,

the tapes could appear to offer a potential form of blackmail.

Listen, that's a nonsense. Blackmailing the bank(!)

When I first recorded the bank, we contacted the board

of Bank of Ireland and told them that we had caught them fiddling.

Why didn't you go to the police at the outset?

Very simple, and I have been asked this 50 times,

"Why not go to the police?"

Look, Kelley and Sarah were two people who...

..were doing a job that they were employed to do.

And the most that was going to happen is that

something was going to happen to those two.

But going to the police on these two?

The people above them... This goes...

The fish rots from the head.

But what did the bank do

when they became aware of the existence of the tapes?

According to Kelley Toner,

managers brought her in and told her she was being filmed.

She says she was then instructed to return to the Meteor job.

We don't know much more about how the bank

reacted internally to the footage.

We do know that they pursued a fraud investigation,

not against Kelley Toner, but against John Conway's firm, Meteor.

The bank wouldn't tell us the detail of their allegations

against John Conway's company, but they claim that

in Meteor's last days, the company engaged in what's known as

"invoice discounting fraud" -

issuing thousands of pounds in false invoices,

knowing the bank would cover them by paying money into Meteor's account.

Bank of Ireland told us they successfully claimed fraud insurance

in the aftermath of Meteor's collapse,

and they said that means insurers were satisfied

that fraud had taken place.

Less than 24 hours ago, Spotlight was leaked a draft

of an internal Bank of Ireland report on the fraud allegations.

It confirms the bank claimed 900,000 euros from their insurers.

But even after that payment,

the bank says it still suffered a loss of almost £500,000.

The Bank of Ireland had refused to give us access

to the evidence on which they base their allegations.

But the fraud report says the bank found more than 100 instances

where there were issues with missing purchase orders, credit notes,

goods returned and goods not received.

Spotlight had already investigated some of the claims.

In a number of cases we found what

appeared to be reasonable explanations.

In other cases, we've not been able to fully investigate

information that would appear to support the bank, partly because

the bank and some other key participants

have not cooperated with us.

But the fraud report also contains the conclusions

of Meteor's liquidator, Cavanagh Kelly,

who investigated the allegation for the bank.

It said...

But if there was no fraud,

how can it be that the bank claimed 900,000 euro in fraud insurance?

Whether or not that was before or after Meteor's liquidator

had said they could not conclude there was any fraudulent activity,

we don't know, and the bank won't tell us.

In fact, we can reveal the bank did not even tell

Meteor's liquidator about the insurance claim.

Have you ever committed fraud?

Let's be serious about this here.

There was never a fraud. This was well covered, well documented.

The liquidator covered it, said there was nothing. Right?

The directors disqualification people gave me

a clean bill of health. There never was an issue.

In June 2014, more than four years after they say they discovered

the alleged Meteor fraud,

Bank of Ireland reported John Conway to the PSNI.

He and his lawyers have questioned the timing of the complaint,

which they say came a few weeks after John Conway

indicated he was attempting to take the bank to court.

Bank of Ireland told us they couldn't answer any questions

about their allegations against John Conway because

they did not want to compromise the PSNI investigation in any way.

They produced this report to the PSNI

and I have never heard tell of it. And that's 18 months ago.

So you are saying that the bank made a complaint to the PSNI in 2014?

You are saying that in the 18 months since then,

you have never been approached by the PSNI?

I actually know very little about it.

But you know what, if there was something wrong, why would the bank

sit on this for four-and-a-half years

before they would go to the PSNI?

This is quite obvious, there was nothing wrong.

This is a nonsense, and it's the bank throwing whatever dirt they can

to try to get the attention away from themselves.

So what DID Bank of Ireland do in response

to the secretly recorded footage?

Bank of Ireland's current code of conduct says there's

an onus on employees to report even a suspicion of something wrong.

We don't know if that was in place when the tapes were made,

but we do know the bank said back then that they applied

the highest standards of integrity to all their dealings.

Hardly the case when Kelley Toner appeared to be

deliberately falsifying records to push through

a fraudulent claim for bad debt.

SHE LAUGHS

That particular claim was rejected when the full records emerged,

including the parts Kelley Toner ordered cut off.

But the company insuring Meteor's debts, Euler Hermes,

with headquarters in London, paid out up to £100,000 in claims to the bank.

We've been told that one false claim could jeopardise the entire payment.

That is serious,

and not only could that invalidate that part of the claim,

but it might invalidate the whole policy.

For all the other claims.

So by lying on one claim she may have invalidated £100,000 worth of claims?

She might have done. I'm not saying she would have done,

it depends partly on the attitude that the insurance company takes,

and what a court - if it ever ended up in court -

might determine in relation to the materiality of that action.

-But it's that serious?

-Yes.

Bank of Ireland never told Euler Hermes about the attempt

to put through a false claim, nor showed them the tapes.

However, Bank of Ireland said they did show the tapes to

their own fraud insurers, the ones who we now know

paid out 900,000 euro.

But the bank would not tell us who those insurers were.

Back in 2009, Kelley Toner was nervous about

how the bank would react to her activities.

But she needn't have worried.

When they were first alerted to the existence of the footage,

bank managers called Kelley Toner in.

We can now reveal that, according to Kelley Toner,

a senior bank official told her

"not to worry", and that the bank would look after her.

Kelley Toner continued to work for the bank for another two years.

She is now operations director for a finance company.

Despite her efforts to stop this programme, she told Spotlight

that if John Conway had not made his secret recordings, she would have

been congratulated by the bank, as she had been many times in the past.

Sarah Breen, who was aware of Toner's actions but seemingly

didn't report them, is still employed by the Bank of Ireland.

Former journalist TD Shane Ross has been critical of

the banking culture, and in particular of the Bank of Ireland.

He sits on the Public Accounts Committee in Dublin,

where a major public inquiry into practices in Irish banks is underway.

He says the broadcast of the tapes will undoubtedly

raise questions in the Dail.

I think there'll be demands for...action.

And particularly from the government,

because the government is a 14% shareholder in Bank of Ireland.

And I don't see how they can tolerate this.

These are two people who are acting on behalf of the Bank of Ireland

and behaving in a way which is kind of the Wild West of banking,

it's just quite uncontrollable and utterly unacceptable.

And it's quite obviously something

which they never expect to be accountable for.

Our legal expert questions the apparent lack of action by the bank

and says the minute they became aware of the tapes,

they should have acted.

Being informed that this sort of thing was going on,

I would certainly expect the bank to conduct an internal investigation

to find out exactly what had happened

and whether there was an innocent explanation for it.

We wrote to the bank repeatedly, looking for just such an explanation.

They said they could not discuss whether there was any

internal disciplinary investigation

because it would breach their duty of care and confidence

to current and former employees.

But Kelley Toner told us there was no disciplinary investigation

or any follow-up inquiry from the bank's audit and compliance people.

John Conway has spent many years in litigation

with the Bank of Ireland and is still fighting the bank's attempts

to enforce his personal guarantee, on the basis that the debt collection

was conducted fraudulently and recklessly.

And 18 months after the bank alerted the police

to allegations of discounting fraud at his company,

John Conway says the PSNI still haven't contacted him.

Why are you doing this now? What is the principle?

Is this about winning a case, is it about money,

is it about recouping your debt?

What is your motivation? Why are you talking to us today?

Uh...

It's probably to get closure. Just get, you know what I mean,

I have, erm...

I have tried for a number of years to get somebody in the bank

to sit down and say, "What we done here is wrong.

"We are sorry, we are not going to do it again.

"This is not what we do."

And instead, they have basically just ignored me.

And, erm...

You know, fuck them.

Shouldn't have said that.

You know, it just comes a stage where you just say,

"Look, enough is enough."

John Conway's sons have started a new electrical supply business,

trading under the old name of Meteor.

In the fraud report, the bank say they see this new business

as a way of continuing the old firm free from debt.

Again, the bank are suggesting fraud, but as we know,

the liquidator was unable to conclude

that there had been fraudulent activity.

And that may be the most significant puzzle of this whole story.

How did the Bank of Ireland claim 900,000 euro in fraud insurance

when John Conway has still not been visited by the police?

John Conway's war with the Bank of Ireland continues.

He fully expects they will bankrupt him in the near future.