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An insight into the character, personality and passion of the leading figures in the Investigation and Intelligence industry who have shaped the way we gather, analyse and utilise information and intelligence.
I think that most people's lives are touched by fraud. We
all know somebody who's had their ID scanned, even if it
hasn't happened to ourselves. We all know somebody who's lost money in an investment
fraud. We know about drugs trafficking. And most people
recognize the horrors of drugs trafficking. Many of us have
had children or family members who've
suffered. So one has to constantly,
absolutely constantly be aware of the legitimate
cause. Because otherwise, of
course, one's risk of breaching the
stalking and harassment legislation and the privacy
legislation and their equivalents around the world,
the risk of breaking those is just too high. These days.
Nobody considers the victim of rape
to be the party at fault. And I think that the
victims of romance frauds need to
realize they are not at fault. Their worst fault
was to be trusting. And somehow they need
to preserve that trust and place all the
blame on the other party.
Hello and welcome to the Intelligence Advantage podcast where we talk
to the movers and shapers and in the investigation and intelligence
space. My name is Gary Miller. I've been an investigative
lawyer for nearly half a century and I'm also the chairman of the
IfG, a network of international investigative and
asset recovery lawyers. I am absolutely thrilled
to be joined today by a very good
friend of long standing, Helen Hatton, who
is the chair of a corporate investigation company
called Central Associates and believe it or not,
is the proud chairman of
that company which her daughter and her son
in law runs as well. So it must be a
real thrill. Helen, welcome and thank you for joining me.
Thanks, Gary. Thank you. Yeah, it's a family business,
although we've rather outgrown just family members now we've
got seven in the office and about 30
in the field. 32 I think at the moment in the field.
So yeah, but family owned, family controlled. Cast your
mind back now, if you will, to when you started your
career. And by no means is
your career over, Helen, but when I looked at you on LinkedIn again,
I found that I ran out of screen space to find the number
of commissions, et cetera, that
you have been head of. But cast your mind back, if
you can, to that very first or even when you're coming out of university,
Cambridge College, did you ever imagine that
X number of years later you would be heading up
a corporate investigation company where you
had, you were in partnership essentially with your daughter and son in law. Did
it ever occur to you, well, no, obviously not. Life
takes crazy twists and turns, doesn't it?
But I've always been, I've always wanted to know
why? Why? I've always been curious.
And so I guess,
although I never imagined it, now looking back, I'm not
all that surprised. I've always been a nosy parker.
Well, my wife tells me all the time when I tell her of
some of the cases that I'm involved in and others like you're involved
in. She said, I would have been a great investigator husband because
I am without doubt the nosiest person I know. So I think
nosiness is an absolute critical skill that an
investigator or a spy. Now, as far as I
know, of course, if you were a really good spy, I wouldn't know you're a
spy. But let's assume that you are just Helen. Just you are Helen
Hatton of a corporate investigation
organization. What other skills does a great
investigator need to have apart from being nosy?
Yeah, well, it's a good question because obviously we think about that, you know,
all the time and it might sound a bit of a
cliche, but it's actually all about the team because different
people bring different attributes. And I'm not sure all attributes
sit in one person. So for example, you
need really, really good analysts. The
folk who sit, you know, in a back room with
a sort of wet towel over their head and just look at numbers, look at
patterns, spent hours scrolling
through stuff, trying to find connections. You need really good
analysts. And then you need people, other people
who have great insight into psychology and what makes
people tick. People who can
feel a lie, people who can sense a
falsehood. And B, my co director and also
my daughter, as you know, is stunningly good at
that. She's the most intuitive and
insightful person I've ever met. In fact, I
find it quite spooky sometimes. Give me an example, Helen,
of how spooky a spooky example. So we,
we had a, a bit of a hospital pass
instruction when we were, well,
the company was, was about 8 years old, but
it started as, you know, as a surveillance business. And
so we were a young company in terms of offering
intelligence. And this rather hospital pass instruction
was to find somebody who the
SFO and Interpol had been looking for
for six years.
Bea found him in about
four hours, an evening of scrolling
and it was. But now you've got to drill down into it and tell
me what that instinctive magic was. Well, it was about this
intuition. So she knew that powers
much greater than ours had been searching for the guy.
So she went through back paperwork and
old interviews and there'd been a lot of witness statements
taken and she did some searching on the wife.
What did we know about the wife? And we found
his wife was a world class
crocheter. Wow. Something no one
will ever accuse me of, Helen. Well, nor me.
And so Bea started looking
for crochet exhibitions. She
thought, if these people have relocated, they've fled.
This woman's craft is going to be even more important
to her. She's lost her friendship circle, her group that
she would normally communicate with. She's going to have to
express herself through her craft. And she found
the market stall, the exhibition,
in a tiny village in France. And as I say, it was all on her
lap and probably whilst feeding a baby and watching
TV on the mobile phone, because she
knows how people work, she knows how people
tick. So I think you need that
extraordinary intuition
to look at things perhaps slightly differently.
I'm straight down the line. I'm quite forensic. I'm very
facts driven. I know quite a
lot about people's patterns of behavior, especially in the fraud world.
You must be a good lie detector as a human being as well, Helen, surely.
Yeah, I think so. But then I think you start to
worry that you've become so cynical you're not too sure you
actually believe anybody. Right. So,
you know, I think I like to make my
decisions on the basis of fact. And you might
follow different lines and avenues on a bit of
hunch and a bit of previous experience and, oh, you know, I've seen this
kind of fraud before. Normally there's a this in it or there's a that
in it. Let's see what's going on in this one.
So, you know, you validate the facts,
but I tend to go on fact.
So I think you need the analysts, you need the
intuits or whatever you might like to call them, you need
the forensic people. Do you need risk
takers, Helen? Oh, absolutely. And then of course,
you also need the people who walk past the risk,
because you can't be gung ho on these things.
Enormous amounts of money turn on it. People's reputation
turns on it. After all, our business, the longevity of our business
turns on it. You and I both know. Sorry to interrupt. You and I both
know that. Really well, any investigators,
but really good investigators operate in that
wonderful narrow gray zone, yes. Between
what is unlawful and
unethical and what is acceptable. And then even
another layer of even if it's lawful, acceptable,
ethical, is it capable of being
used in evidence anywhere, or is it just in form,
a strategic approach? So
you have to be good at living in that gray area,
which means you have to Be a risk taker. Well, you do. And
I think also one has to constantly,
absolutely constantly be aware of the
legitimate cause, because
otherwise, of course, one's risk of breaching
the stalking and harassment legislation and the
privacy legislation and their equivalents around the world,
the risk of breaking those is just too high. And
one's legitimate cause for pushing
the boundary of reasonably expected privacy is very,
very important to understand and document and. In
your career, which we'll
cherry pick, because there are so many things. Well, I'm getting old,
Gary. So it's been a long one. I won't hear of it.
I saw on LinkedIn a number of things that you're doing, which I had
no idea. But you'll give me a few examples of
extracurricular activity, no doubt, but in your
various positions as heads of. Now, let me get this right.
It was Isle of Man Financial Services Commission. Yeah. I was
Director of Enforcement there. And then there was Jersey.
Yep. And then there was Anguilla. Am I right?
Yes. See, I've done a little bit of homework. Yeah, I'm impressed.
And after Anguilla, were there any other commissions?
Well, not as such, no. Although I've done work
for a number of others. So, for example, the BVI
appointed my firm, which I've
subsequently sold, but Sator, the regulatory consulting firm,
they appointed us the reporting professional
to take over Mossack Von Secker. So we were
absolutely at the heart of all of that. I had 18
staff in there for about two and a half years. Remind me, what
was the underlying naughtiness there? Well,
they just. Well, to be frank, they just got caught
at the time of a change of political view.
So Mossack Fonseca were a Panamanian
law firm. That's right. But in addition to that, they were a
company formation agency business
and they also had company
administration services, which they offered
from pretty much all jurisdictions around the
world. So if you were based in London and you wanted an offshore
company, you could pop into Moss Saxon in London and
they could talk to you about which was the best jurisdiction for your particular
needs. What eventually was their undoing. What
was it that. Yeah, well, they failed to do adequate
know your customer. They failed to
properly understand the risks of their own business. Back to
the risk factor again. Yeah, absolutely. And of course, the
interesting thing is, is particularly in this day
and age, there is as much risk, if not
greater risk, in who you are acting for as
there is in the actual methodology
of undertaking an investigation. Yes, oh,
absolutely. I mean, the Mossack one was the.
Their data is the core of the Panama Papers scandal.
I see. So that's how many people will. And remind me, did
Mossack survive or was it put into liquidation? And
a couple of the partners are in jail or I don't know if they still
are, but they certainly were sentenced at the time.
So we did a lot of work with the bvi. I did a tremendous amount
of work in Aruba, also Ghana.
Aruba must be an interesting. I can't remember that I've done
anything there, but it's got that kind of Nevis
kind of feel to it. Or am I being unfair?
So Aruba is Dutch. It's part of,
you know, the ABC Islands
with Curacao and so on and
Bonaire. Curacao and Aruba.
I think years ago. Were they called the Netherland
Antilles? I think that's right. They were called Netherlands Antilles. Yeah.
And it's a really interesting jurisdiction to work in for a
number of reasons. It's very interesting from a
cultural and anthropological and social history point
of view. All of which are things I'm interested in because
being a Dutch settlement
colony, if you like, in the early days,
the Dutch never
introduced slavery, the concept of slavery and agriculture
through slavery. So the population
in Aruba is the original Aramaic
Indians of the Caribbean, which,
you know, as Brits, we're used to
African Caribbean people. But that isn't the model
in Aruba. So that's an interesting thing.
So just give me an example because I've never been there and I wonder whether
anybody. Very few people in our hopefully
audience. It is more than my wife and my kids
and yours. Not many people will have been to
or at least investigated in there. Give me an example of
why that. What kind of cultural difference it is and what difference
that would. And what that would. How that would impact
undertaking an investigation or finding out about people in
Aruba. Okay, so my work was for the Central bank
and my job there was to rewrite their anti money laundering
legislation, some amendments to their company's
law and create a regulatory regime
for corporate service providers. So that was what I was doing at
the time. And also gaming legislation which I did in
the Isle of Man. But Aruba is a big,
big gaming center. So their
primary industry
is tourism. And they came up
with the idea of enhancing their tourism by
only or mainly at any event, issuing
planning permission for hotels that also had
casinos in them. So it's a bit.
It's. Whilst it's a beautiful Caribbean beach resort,
it has Las Vegas style
fabulous resort host hotels with gaming
and of course with gaming comes its own
criminal fraternity, which in the main
was very well controlled, but probably not
with formal legislation in a manner that met
international standards. So one
of the other interesting things from an investigatory point of view
is that a company in most of the
Dutch jurisdictions isn't formed by a company registry
in the concept of our.
Of our British legal model. It's formed by a notary,
by a notarial decree. And then it's up
to that company whether it chooses to put its
details and information on a register, which is just
a chamber of commerce type register. So of course that
doesn't meet modern standards of transparency. So I
was working with them to help bring all that
kind of thing in. Give me an example of, if
you would, one of
the, I don't know about worse, but one of the most either
interesting or serious
sets of circumstances that you investigated or
if you didn't investigate, that you heard of as having happened, which is why they
needed to bring you in.
So my
first involvement with them was that I was the financial sector lead
for the IMF review of Aruba
in terms of its adherence with the
FATF, the Anti Money Laundering 40 recommendations.
And so step one of that is to go through their national risk
assessment. And actually what type of risk did they
have? And what was very interesting was
that despite
the majority of the staff
in these hotels that I've mentioned being Venezuelan,
there was no money going back to
Venezuela. And yet the Latin habit
back to me liking the psychology of people and
people's behavior, the psychology of Latin
immigrant workers is very much to send money
home. That's why they're overseas working, is
to send money home like so many groups of
people. And there was no money going
back to Venezuela. So that was an
absolute hole in the data. I'm sort of
forensically driven. It was just a screaming
gap. And when you identify that gap,
you then identify a whole underground
money train, which of course was the
quid pro quo for the fact that
Chavez, who was in power at the time,
was not allowing dollar transactions. But of course
there's a demand for dollars. So you had this underground
dollars going in and then
oil dollars and narco dollars coming out.
So that was a very interesting piece to unravel.
Another one I remember from Aruba was
an odd thing, and I found it quite shocking,
which was that there was an area there. I'm sure the
area's still there, but I hope it's not
continuing in the same vein, called
Saint Martin. I think Saint something, anyway.
Saint something, forgive me if it's not Saint Martin, I know that's an
adjacent island, but there's a little town in Aruba
called Sense something or other. And it was where
prostitution was okay, all kinds of vice were
okay so long as it stayed in that area. Sort
of unofficial blind eye turned to it. And
again as happens in many cities and many countries around the
world, including London.
And when we did the whole
risk assessment we found it's
100,000 population Aruba, which is the same as
Jersey. So I found it very interesting to look at another
offshore jurisdiction with quite a busy tourism trade, a busy
financial services sector, offshore offerings, same number
of people, high standard of living, very similar
in some respects to Jersey. And we found
seven.
Trafficked children,
Quite a few trafficked women. This
is back in when Helen, what time was that? This was in
I think 2011. So a while ago now.
And so I came back to Jersey and we
started looking at our scenario here.
And although thankfully at that time we didn't find
any traffic children, subsequently we have found two
here and
at that time we had seven trafficked brides
in Jersey. And the numbers are remarkably similar.
And of course you might say, well you know, that's nothing to
do with the IfG. It's nothing to do with
private legal work if you like.
It's not big bucks
on the asset tracing or anything like that. In fact, far from it. These
are poor miserable souls that have been abused in
the most awful, awful imaginable ways. But
they make profit and the profit goes through our
financial institutions and through our shell companies.
And that's where the management of risk in our
clients businesses becomes so vital to understand.
Now you've touched a point, as you probably
will recall, that resonates particularly
with me because around the COVID time when
I thought it was about time that I did a little bit for
some, some family other than the Miller family,
I found. Stop the traffic. Yes. And even
not even to this day. The thing that astonishes
me is the lack of
awareness amongst the financial community
as to trafficking could not occur
without them facilitating the transfer of
monies that derive from that activity. Yes. And
it just hasn't. I mean there's
lots of great work being done by Ruth and
other organizations. Polaris, I think another one.
But this connection between organized crime,
trafficking and the stability and the
legitimacy of the financial system just doesn't seem
to resonate with law enforcement. But why Helen? What's, what's going on?
I don't know. I think,
I think it's as simple as this. I think that most people's
lives are touched by fraud. We all know somebody who's
had their ID scanned, even if it hasn't happened to ourselves.
We all know somebody who's lost money in an investment fraud. We
read about fraud in the newspapers and big
cases and so on. It's part of our knowledge.
We know about drugs trafficking. And most people recognize the
horrors of drugs trafficking. Many of us have had children
or family members who've suffered as
a result of the drugs trade. For most of
us, it's an anathema. But
thankfully not many of us
have had firsthand experience of human trafficking.
And so you imagine it doesn't happen or that it
happens somewhere else or that it happens to other people.
And it is a real shock when you
do realize that it actually goes on right on your
doorstep and right in your communities.
And it's far more prevalent. I mean, it's the
only area. I mean, I suppose I should do more in
other areas, but it's the only area where I do
charity work and where I give my professional time
for nothing. I think we've all got to do more
absolutely to try to prevent this. And of course
it's also. Sorry, let me interrupt you for a second.
One of the reasons, apart from apathy, I agree with you.
Apathy. Plus, how many of us
really come into contact with somebody
without realizing that, for example, if you look at any
business that has got massage written on it, it is at least
prone to having women who are trafficked. But
put that to one side at the moment, one of the reasons
that this never gets
investigated fully is corruption. And
I wanted to ask you, in your really
rich and long career,
may it continue, what are the examples of
corruption that you've come across in either
in a place where you wouldn't expect it, or in government or in
policing that has had a meaningful impact
on either the work you're doing or on society?
You must have come across a few examples that you could share with us.
Yeah, I mean, you do. We've
in central, we've done quite a lot of work on grand
corruption cases. I mean, our work has only been a small part
obviously of the main cases.
And that's interesting. You see people,
for example, I mean, just a whole load of them really. You see,
African Regional Development bank gets a load of money from
the World Bank. The Regional Development
bank forwards it on to actual
commercial banks. The commercial banks lend it out
for major infrastructure development
areas. I mean, one of the ones we were involved in was a big
hydroelectric dam
complex thing and
it's very clear from this end of the story
that the parties who applied for
the loan had agreed to share the money with
the bank officials. The bank officials did
ridiculously little due diligence.
I mean, pathetically little due diligence.
A child would have done better. And these are all intelligent people
who, you know, have probably got, well, a couple of them did
have way better qualifications than me. You know, there's nothing about
them being undeveloped or innocent or, you know, not
sophisticated. These are smart, educated, competent business
people in the
bank. But they were quite
happy to loan,
I think one, one
tranche of money was £800 million and another was
into the billion.
I mean huge amounts of money with
no paperwork on the files worth anything,
didn't demand performance payments, which
again is ridiculous. I mean you wouldn't, you wouldn't
pay your builder, your ordinary domestic builder on
the basis of giving them all the money up front and not knowing their
address. You know, it's, it's ridiculousness beyond belief.
And then of course they all disappear with the dosh.
And that's very difficult when
the very people who are needed to give the evidence
about the so called
fraudsters are actually part
of the fraud. And a lot of them have left,
ensuring there aren't many records left behind.
Give me an example. Sorry to interrupt you yet again, Helen. Give me
an example of
where if you have given evidence in relation to
a, and I understand that most of your particular
area would be the forensic side of things, but
can you recall being cross examined and being
in a court or interrogated by the
police in relation to your
expert opinion on something or your view of something on
the basis of which prosecution was either in course or
about to be initiated?
Yeah, I've given evidence in court on
a number of times. Sorry, we've got a noisy bird outside.
It's the joy of putting up bird tables, but they're
not so good for zoom calls. I've
done quite a lot of court work in giving evidence and also
expert witness,
all bar one in relation to fraud.
None of those have related to corruption.
But I'll tell you one corruption case which is quite an
interesting one because the sort of grand corruption
we all recognize, and certainly all of the people that are
likely to be listening to this call are
well aware and recognize grand corruption. I think
the area that is more
insidious is corruption with a small C.
And we do see that
constantly. And this is
to do with
the old school tie, it's to do with not
letting the side down. What, how does that
one work? It's to do with
keeping the lid on things, dealing with it privately,
and that we see a lot within corporate
bodies, mostly, yes, and also
investments. So we dealt with one earlier this
year, which is a
frightfully elegant, grand, immaculate
name. Asset manager in
London, small firm, his own firm,
impeccably connected.
Thought it was a great idea to invest money
in a horrid little scheme, which I think
goes right to the heart of integrity,
which was, oddly enough,
illegal immigrants can't
borrow money to buy a car to be an Uber driver.
Right. May not have crossed anybody's mind before,
but once it does, it's an obvious fact
now, bless them. These guys are here to build a better
life and they're willing to work. So, you know, there's a
big slug of me that has some sympathy for these people.
Immigration rules are difficult. Probably the
threat of breaking the immigration rules aren't as bad as the threat
of being shot, murdered, mutilated back
home. So that's not my part of the ship to make judgments on
that above my pay scale.
So if you can't borrow money from
Black Horse or who have you, then who do you go to?
But.
A private lending broker kind of
a guy, loan shark. So this broker. Yeah, this
broker went to our client, who
was the immaculate city gent, and
explained that he would get a
28% interest on his money
and he could prove the ownership of the cars.
You know, gave him spreadsheets
with all the DVLA
registrations and everything on
and which garages these cars were at and,
you know, the whole nine yards. So this city guy
put a couple of hundred grand of his own money in and then
thought it was a great idea for his insider pals to all also
stick a load of money in. So they did.
And they were charging the Uber drivers 28%.
Well, presumably more, because I expect the broker made a turn as well.
Absolutely. I mean, I knew Uber driving
was a good business. I had no idea that it was
that profitable, but there you go, you. Know, this is such
exploitation of people trying to make
a better life. You know, whatever you think about the immigration
rules, these poor devils, at least they're working, you know,
and they shouldn't be
on the tail end of
enormously wealthy. Frightfully, frightfully,
you know, upper echelons
of. Of Mayfair kind of characters. I mean, I.
I'm just still angry about them. Anyway, the point of the story is the small
c. The small corruption. Yes. Which
is that he got eight, I think it was, of his mates
in so we're now into several
million pounds. Oddly enough,
the 28% suddenly doesn't come back, the paycheck
suddenly doesn't arrive and it had done for
a year or so, paid monthly.
And we're asked
to find this broker. Guy had his name,
had his mobile phone number, various
addresses. The addresses turned out to be
not quite completely false. One was
a former girlfriend's address,
but certainly not his own address. So again, no due
diligence of any kind. Before, let me
pause you, were you acting for this very
wealthy pucker individual who wanted to know where his
28% was? Yeah. So you're already in a position
where you're a little bit internally conflicted, maybe not
commercially. Well, we weren't at the beginning. We thought. I see. We thought he was
the real deal. It comes out when you're down the track.
He didn't start off saying, actually, this was a real dodgy thing and
I shouldn't have done it. He started out saying it was a
specialist car purchase scheme and we thought
they were probably going to be vintage cars or something or other. Right.
So anyway, the story
comes out inch by inch. So all these guys
have lost their millions. We find the broker chap, he's already
locked up. This is only one cell
of greedy idiots that he's got to
invest money in his dodgy scheme. And so
there were no immigrants buying or borrowing from him.
There were immigrants, but he
was a very keen member
of one of the North London mosques and
the mosques were handing out the dosh and these
guys were actually getting their money, not paying any
exploitative interest. But the fact that the mosque was doing
a charitable job on the money of the uber wealthy.
You know, there was a lot of irony in all of this. It was
quite a funny. I mean, not that you could laugh to the client, but it
was quite a funny case in some respects.
The broker got locked up
for an earlier seller. Right.
But our client, I wanted him, of
course, to submit
our file and all our evidence because
we'd got the evidence of the car
dealers who were selling very
dodgy cars to these guys and the mosque that was
financing these cars. We got all that evidence
and the fact that all these DVLA things
were mostly forged,
but he wouldn't go and they just all
accepted their losses and nobody would spill the beans
and nobody would say a word
and he would rather lose his money than
be identified as being involved with this kind of a
scheme. Now you can
say, well, it couldn't happen to a more
deserving bunch you could say that. But
as a matter of fact, quite a lot of bad behaviors
have gone unanswered for as a result of
withholding that evidence. Absolutely. And that's a sort of
irony filled and quite funny tale.
But another which where I, if you like, I was the victim
was back in regulatory days,
I needed to shut down a trust company
here in Jersey that was.
I won't give you opinion because this is going to be broadcast.
I'll give you the stated facts.
The facts of the matter were that this trust
company did not meet the commission's fit and proper
standard. There's three elements to fit and proper.
Solvency, competence and integrity. And
it did not meet one or more of those legs
of our test. And so their license was being
revoked and the
owner of this trust company, chartered
accountant, a.
I don't know what you call it, postholder position holder.
Office holder. Office holder. Yeah, office holder in
the local Masonic movement. Also
highly connected politically and
seeking to form a new political party,
slightly right of center political party
here in Jersey. And it may be of interest to
people watching this that we don't have party politics in Jersey. Everybody
stands as an independent. Everybody is accountable for their
own vote. There's no whip, there's no party
line here. So it's very accountable government.
Anyway, I was stopped
12 times by the police
on leaving after
evening events in town on the basis of
information received that I'd been drinking and
driving. And I don't drink and drive. And who the hell would
after the first time you'd been stopped, even if you'd had half a glass of
champagne, you'd not have anything. So, you know,
I had not been drinking and driving, but I was still stopped
12 times. Full baggage and
luggage searches every time I flew in and out. Wow.
And it wasn't until I went to the chief constable to say
somebody is influencing the day to day behavior of your
officers and this is not appropriate.
In fact, I think you're unbelievably patient. If I'd been done twice, I
probably would have been irate. But is that the. Give us an
example. I mean, together with corruption, of course,
intimidation is often
employed or deployed. That is
unpleasant, frustrating. In your career
as a commissioner and
or as part of the investigation
organizations and central, have you or anybody
in the group been subject to any
greater and more severe intimidation in terms of
don't investigate that you're going to get into serious
physical harm? Yes, I mean, I think that
does happen.
Julian, our managing director, Jules is the one to
talk to about his experiences. He's been in
complicated undercover type scenarios
where he has certainly been at high levels of risk,
Bea. And he have quite
considerable expertise in securing hostile service
where, you know, there's been a surveillance exercise going on
for several days, sometimes even months,
to ensure that successful service of somebody who
has a track record of evasion. This is legal proceedings you're talking about.
Legal proceedings. Yeah, absolutely. And they've had a couple of
scenarios that have been very sticky, but they're also
very good at de escalating circumstances. And,
you know, they wear body cams and we would,
if a situation was likely to escalate, we would also
have, you know, one of our
vehicles, which has cameras and so on, in
filming from a distance. So even if the body cam is
identified and seized, we would have other footage.
So they're very careful about all of that kind of thing. Very
careful. It's a real live risk. At what stage,
Sorry, let me ask you this, Helen. At what stage did Bea,
your daughter, suddenly decide that in addition
to being a mother and a partner or whatever,
she wanted to get involved in the investigations business?
Was that under influence from you or not? No, I
mean, we'd worked together for a while and I think she
always loved that. And of course, she'd been involved in
internal audit and fraud investigations for Royal bank of Scotland
before. Oh, I didn't know that. Oh, yeah, she had a very good
career with the bank in the early days.
Very good career. She was the youngest branch manager ever appointed
in Royal bank of Scotland. She was branch manager of Taunton
branch, which is a county town, when she was
21. Very capable,
bright girl, as you know. But what
caused her to be involved in
investigations was actually Covid.
So not
many people pay for surveillance
during lockdown.
Although you can see a way that that might happen in terms
of tracking people that would use that as cover. But anyway, carry
on. Absolutely. So the
Central had always done a certain amount. Oh, gosh, we've got a plane
going over, I'm
afraid
Central had always done a certain amount of investigation work,
but its main business was surveillance
and Julian is really quite outstanding at that
and the teams he leads. So
when lockdown happened, there's suddenly a big
hole in the income of the business and of
course, at that time none of us knew how long it was going to go
on. So
Bea, having done so much
investigative work and intelligence work, really
started promoting that and we actually
formally identified it as a division of the business
and started marketing it. We'd always done some and she
had Experience from the bank and
also working with me in the regulatory consulting
field. But, you know, she got on the case and really
marketed it, and lots of the friends, and particularly the law
firms, and particularly our best friend, law firm friends in
Mishcon and through the IfG, you know, they
were all very glad to hear that we'd started that line
as a properly resourced business line rather than perhaps as a
sideline, which it had been pre2020.
So knowing your and her background, it was almost inevitable, actually,
when you look back and you put the pieces together, that you two would
join up at some stage in the future, because you were doing very
similar things, weren't you? Yes, yes. And did she
go into it because of you, Helen? Did she look at what you were doing
in the Financial Services Commission and
say, you know what? I want to be in that place?
Yeah, I think she's always. I mean, she's a curious person as well,
you know, back to the beginning of what we were talking about. And she
loves a challenge, she loves fixing a puzzle,
as do I, and she likes.
I mean, we'll all understand this, you know, our idea of a good business
is where you work with and for people you like,
you do work that's of value, you have fun and you make
some money. And, you know,
so she was always going to be doing something a bit
innovative, something a bit interesting with
interesting people. And this
investigation work is huge fun.
It's utterly fascinating, Gary, as you know. Well,
so I'm very interested
also to know how many other
women do you and B know that are in the
investigation business? I'm going to be. I've already spoken to one,
but I'm hoping to speak to as many of them
as I can because there are not that many women in the investigation
business, Helen. And I know that there are all sorts of obvious
reasons, but it's not been a barrier to you or
B, do you know others that are in and
I just haven't come across them. Kosalind Wright, the second director of the
Serious Fraud Office, and, you know, she
was, well, still is a wonderful, wonderful lady.
And if there's somebody who can totally
prove that women can become senior
in the fraud world, I think she was probably my role
model. So has she been one person that's had a major
impact on your approach to life?
Oh, definitely. She is. She
is a person who has in buckets
the attributes I really admire in another human being.
She's intelligent, she's kind, she's got
absolute integrity and,
you know, it Goes, you go a long way to beat those
three things. She's got a generous heart.
She helped me a lot in my early career.
How did you come across her, Helen? How did you come across. Well, just
the first time I met her.
Was when she took over from George Staple. I'd
met George Staple. I actually, I could pull it out. It'd
probably be too much rustling for the video thing, but I've still got it. In
1992, I went to a conference. I've still
got the conference brochure. And George.
I was Director of enforcement then in the Isle of Man. And George
Staple was giving the opening address.
It was about fraud. And
he, you know, perhaps
difficult to imagine, but in 1992, he was like a
blonde God, you know,
such a handsome man. And he stood there, you know, and he
started talking about Lilliput and had any
of. Had any of us read
Jonathan Swift, you know, and Gulliver's Travels and so on?
And a few people nodded, a few people shook their head. And he
said, have you ever wondered why the only
offense carrying the punishment
of capital punishment in Lilliput was
fraud? Have you ever wondered why. And of course, everybody
looked nonplussed, you know, in the audience, me included. I was racking
my brains to remember the story. And
he said, because it's the cruelest
crime. It steals a person's most
precious attribute, and that is their
trust. Which we know is
at the heart of almost every fraud, isn't it?
Absolutely. And it so captured me.
I was dealing with a couple of vicious investment frauds
at the time where I was Director of Enforcement for the Isle of Man Financial
Services Commission. And it completely matched
these investors who'd been defrauded of their life
savings and were not just financial
losses like the pucker guys in
Mayfair that I talked about earlier. You know, it wasn't
pin money to these investors.
One lady lady called Mrs. Darrowsley, I'll never forget. She
cried on the phone and said, you
don't understand. I can't feed my
husband. Yeah.
And this is a story, Helen, that you and I are hearing
on a daily basis almost from people that
are being. That are victims of the romance scams
and the cyber scams. What's the answer? What
investigative tools are out
there in order to help these victims who
have nowhere to go, even if they did have a bit of money,
you and I know, trying to recover 100,000, 50,000,
which is someone's life savings, is. It's just impossible with that
amount of money. What's the answer? I think
it's an interesting thing. I'll give you a little bit of a different
story, if you would forgive me.
I recently reread some of the old Jane Austen novels.
And in the Georgian era,
they relied on knowing who your family was.
They relied on letters of introduction,
they relied on personal knowledge. There
wasn't Internet, there wasn't directories in libraries that
you could look up. There wasn't microfiche, microfilm, you know, all
the different iterations of information
gathering that we have today, they didn't have any of it. They
relied on knowing
where a person came from and where they fitted and what their
reputation was. Now, we've thrown
all of that out of the bath. You know, we've thrown the baby out of
the bathwater. We've throwing all that away.
And, you know, you think
of the total lack of regard that we
have today for where people come from, where they went to
school, who their family is, what their father did for a living.
We are programmed today not to care about those
things. In fact, caring about those things marks you
as a snob, marks you as socially pretentious.
So if you're going to throw all of those things away, and I think probably
it's a good thing that we've moved on from there. But if you're going to
throw all those things away, you've got to replace it with something else,
otherwise you are a sitting victim.
I agree with you. But come back to my question. How do people. Is
there an answer? If so, you're going to hear it first
on this episode of the Intelligence Advantage. How do these
people track them down? I don't know that there's a hundred percent
answer, but my word, you can start tipping the odds in your
favor. You know,
we have a couple of clients in the last six months
that have been victims to nasty
romance fraud. And of course, we had the
enormous romance fraud that I've done the case study for you
and your colleagues on, which just beggared
belief. I mean, that was organized crime and extreme.
Remind me, was that here or somewhere else? No,
that was London. The victim was a London businessman. Right,
but. And we've worked that into a really good case study,
which we're happy to run for anybody that wants a
bit of sort of CPD for colleagues. But I think
we've got two literally in the last six months.
And we were able, you know, I don't want to
give away our fee income, but we were able to
identify these people and identify that
they probably were going to be Fraudsters
very quickly, you know, look on their social
media. But come back to this,
I'm with you on the due diligence, but I
phone you up, I've been scammed over, let's say
six months of ten grand because I found my
bride who was allegedly coming from. It could be Plymouth, but it's more likely
to be the Philippines. And I've asked my
bank to send it out to a bank in
Philippines and it's all gone. And
they ask you what can you do to help
and track where the money's gone. And the, of course you and I know
the actual fraudster. They never met, they never saw the
real person they were looking and talking to a fake. How do you,
how do you get your head around that kind of investigation,
Helen? Okay, well where I think first of all
you get the low hanging fruit and the low hanging fruit
is that these days the money, the banks will pay you your money back.
If you've made a fraudulent transfer, the
banks will reimburse you. Now,
a bit like some of the other things we've talked about, whether
you feel because many of us represent financial
institutions as well, that threshold has gone too
far in the favor of careless and
negligent customers, silly customers
is another matter. But the way it stands at the moment is the
banks will almost always. But that's on a
voluntary basis, isn't it? It's on a voluntary basis and it's. There's a
limit. No, not really. There's a very heavy
FCA code setting down the guidelines on which the
monies should be. The
balance rests very firmly with the,
with the so called victim.
There would be some circumstances where the banks weren't obliged
to pay, but that's your number one stop, is try and get
some money back and also get the
coordinates of where the money went.
So I think those are quick things that you
can do. Getting money back
does not, in my experience of these
things actually make the
client feel very much better.
It might alleviate the
financial hardship.
But the clients that we tend to represent have got plenty
more money. They've in
fact, I think the most recent one we introduced to
Mishkan, we introduced him
to one of your partners
in the family section. It was
a very sad case where he'd been completely
duped and transferred several lots
of cash, I think from
memory in the region of sort of £80,000 type
area of money, but also bought some very expensive
jewelry. But the big thing was
that he'd fallen in love and
getting the money back doesn't fix the
emotional pain. So. So I think
I would like to see
more clients becoming
a little more. And this
perhaps sounds horridly hard, but I did say at the beginning that
I sometimes felt I was becoming a bit cynical.
I think clients, it's. It's sort of
emotional rape
now, these days.
It should have been always, but that wasn't
always true. These days, nobody considers the
victim of rape to be the
party at fault.
And I think that the victims of romance
frauds need to realise they are not at fault.
Their worst fault was to be trusting
and somehow they need to preserve that
trust and place all the blame on
the other party. The other party has behaved appallingly.
Now I want to do something or other about getting what money back I can
and moving forward. And I think where we're
advising people
and, you know, different people may well have a different view.
Probably my daughter is one, actually. She's much higher on the
empathy than I am. I think
my line would be to say, you know, bad things
happen to good people, you are a good person,
it's a bad thing, it's that bad person's fault. Let's
get some dosh back for you and move on.
But they need to do their due diligence. Next time round,
I think I might be swaying closer to the Helen
Hatton book. Perhaps there's no surprise that we've been friends so long,
but would you agree with me that
looking at the world in which we live in, where, as you say,
social context is, if not
put by the wayside, or indeed people don't know how to
check that, because what do you do? You go onto a social
media platform to find out about the
person that you might be dating or that you might be doing business with.
But my gut tells me it
has never been so important as it is now,
for there to be
more investigation
organizations who are making their time
and energy available to people
that have been the victims of these. These
low, I say low ticket, you know, smallish ticket
frauds where there are
hundreds, if not thousands of people that have been taken advantage
of. And I think that's the challenge of
your industry. But I don't know what you would say is
the legal profession can do not very much.
It is, and I've always said to people in any kind
of petition, investigate first, then
let's see what you've got, where the money is, where it's gone.
But the problem is investigation is becoming so damn
expensive. So isn't it the time for
something to happen in the private sector for
investigators to provide some kind of
access. And I know there's litigation funding, but where do you.
How can we make a difference? So if,
if people want a very straightforward
profile done on someone. Yeah.
And it's just a, a simple
due diligence, not corporate structures and you know,
offshore things, which obviously is the main part of, of what
we do. But if somebody wants a simple
due diligence on a relative, on an individual
and a British individual or even
I'd say a Western European. A
Western person, not necessarily European, could be American, Australian, Canadian,
but a Western civil civilization place,
we can, as can any
decent investigations firm, we can
do a profile on that for somewhere between 3 and
500 pounds according to what the
scope of it is. Right. And
you know, if you're. These days,
people generally early in dating generally take it in turns
to pay the bill. You're talking about a
damn good dinner out. You're not even the covering the
tickets for a concert.
So although it might sound a lot of money at one level, it really.
Isn'T in the context of some of the
lifestyles that people lead. Well, I've seen,
I've noticed that I have well overrun
my hour with Helen. And as you and I know,
Helen, you and I can rabbit on for days.
Hours if not days. So I want to thank you for
sharing your experiences with us so much more
that I wanted to talk about and I may well knock on your
door again. I will certainly be knocking on Bees and Julian's door
because they also bring their unique
skill sets to the party. But I really am grateful to you
for sharing with me and with us this afternoon and
long may you stay active in the investigation space.
Helen. Thank you. Well, I'm still enjoying my work and
fortunately still fit and I'm still up for it.
Gary, I've got another piece, if you didn't mind, that could just
be edited in on due diligence piece. And
I wanted to say that we're often asked,
but particularly by Gulf and
Indian families, to do full due
diligence reports on individuals that are
potentially partners for their
children or arranged marriages or whatever.
I see. Well, not even necessarily arranged, but, you
know, the young
person has met somebody that they like and
the family want them vetted and they want
full, thorough vetting. Right.
And so we do those profiles and
that would go into business reputation
of the main family business activities.
It would go into whether or not their, you know, conduct at
university had been good, whether they had a
criminal record, whether they'd been involved in drugs, whether they
you know, had had
inappropriate relationships, as in highly inappropriate
relationships, you know, perhaps associated with criminals and
what have you. Does this individual bring
a black male risk, a reputational risk
into the family? And we do quite a lot of those. They're
quite big pieces of work and
they normally, of course, because most young people
are terrific, they normally have a very happy
ending, but in fact facilitate
the moving forward of that relationship. So it isn't all
gloom and doom, I suppose, is what I wanted to say.
Well, I'm not sure how much of that I'll be able to include, but I
am the better off understanding what you're doing. And
this is a growing area of business for you guys because
it's clearly something that families, particularly, as you
say, in certain parts of the world, they're not that familiar
with the ways of the Western world and they need some help. Yeah.
On that note, I may the Force
continue to be with you and the gang and we will see you
soon. Lovely. Take care, darling. Be good. Take care. Bye now. Bye
bye. Thank you for listening and if you enjoyed this
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