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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.
What was the biggest thing you came away with after seeing Mike
and listening to him? Attention to detail. Now
you ask me, it's attention to detail, which was the slogan of
Mike's company at the time. But I didn't know that at the time. But it
was. If you see something and it
makes you think, I've got a bad feeling about this. Have a
look. When I was leaving the Ukraine, it was in 2003 at Boryspol
Airport. I was put into a room for an hour and they took my
passport, their phone and everything off me and just didn't. I
wasn't allowed to speak. It was nothing. I was just taking everything, my coat, my
bags, everything. They just put me in a room. There's a book called the Dyslexic
Advantage and I think quite a lot of dyslexics can actually.
So I can. I can read a page of numbers or text and see everything.
I can sort of. You sort of scan or photograph the page and I
think that's really helped with my fraud investigation skills. The Norwegian
culture's heavily, heavily, heavily based on trust.
I think that's the worst word that they would embrace. Of course, the problem
with that is it can also lead to.
Hello, and welcome to the Intelligence Advantage podcast where we talk
to the movers and shapers 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 super
excited to welcome an another dear friend of mine who has
excelled in everything that he has done in life so
far, apart from investigating, which would
include for this particular guest, accounting,
computer science, academy, founder,
lecturer, author, screenwriter,
and last but not least, actor. I am talking
about none other than Nigel Ayer. Welcome, Nigel.
Thank you very much, Gary. I have known you, Nigel, for
gosh nigh on 25 plus years.
Yeah, getting on to 30, actually. Get on for 30 years and we'll come on
to as we chat, one of the
most significant figures certainly in my life, and I
suspect probably yours, that connected us
both. But because I have read through so many
things and areas and skills that you've got, what I have to ask
you, first of all, is if you hadn't have been an
investigator, what would you have ended up doing?
Two things. I would have either been a chef, which was my
dream when I was 5 years old, or I would have
been a screenwriter,
which is what I did do later on when finally my parents Thought
I was old enough to not be a professional and I could do my
masters in screenwriting when I was 42 years old.
Excellent. So that tells you so much about the
human being, Nigel, one, that at 42, it took you
42 years to get the inner confidence to be able to
tell your parents, or to even ask me, your parents, maybe,
that could you do this degree. And secondly,
that you had these artistic
torrents and currents raging within you that
you have only barely managed to suppress over the years because
you look at the. The screenwriting and
the. The acting. We'll get on to the acting part in a minute,
but. So what was it? And is
it an obvious answer? My parents to the question, what?
Determined that you would not become a chef?
Which kind of disappears, certainly, in terms of your list of
skills. I do lots of cooking for the homeless in my SP
or things like that. So I do big meals. And
I think the last time was Christmas. 1,500 people. I ran a kitchen.
And this is just to let the viewers and the listeners in
on our secret. Your home is Oslo,
correct? Where there is surprisingly large amounts of homeless people.
Yes. Because most people have this. Well, a
lot of people have this perception that
Scandinavia, and Oslo in particular, because of the size of its
oil reserves, etcetera, is an incredibly affluent place. And I'm
sure, and I've been there a few times, so I know that it can be.
But from what you said, it's also got its rough side as well. Yeah. I
think any society has the people that just fall out.
And it's not because the government doesn't want to do anything about it. It's because
it just sometimes just can't. It just can't get round that many things.
Yeah. So coming back, coming back to the
youthful creature, Nigel, can you
remember that, that watershed moment where you were going
to go left chef, right accounting.
It was very simple. My parents are Indians originally. And like
I always say, like most Indian parents, they want their kids to
become a doctor or a lawyer, something respectable. I wasn't
able to meet that, so I. Chartered
accountancy came quite high on the list because my mum felt it had the word
chartered in it and it meant the Queen would give me some sort of award
or something. So that was. That was okay. But then I had a bit of
a moment when I actually was playing in a rock band. I was
going to join a rock band and I got. I got the invitation to do
a scholarship at the Royal Northern College of Music, or to. To do a. To
basically, I was given this chance to get a scholarship at the Royal Northern College.
I got this fantastic letter and it was just before my 16th,
17th birthday and my dad knew I wanted to play in the school
rock band, but I didn't have a keyboard and he
basically suggested, he bought me an amazing
far Feasa organ that I could be in the rock band and be the cool
guy in the school if I ripped up the letter.
So it was just a wonderful bribe. I just ripped up the letter straight away
and joined the rock band and then became a chartered accountant
a long time after that. Yeah, go figure. I mean, I guess we could
spend quite a bit of time just talking about that little unwrapping,
that little bunch of facts. But let's, if you don't mind,
let's look a little bit at the, the
parenting and the way that you were brought up. You've got us. To
me as a born and bred Londoner, you've got a slight northern accent.
Yeah. So where does that come from? Manchester.
Manchester. Manchester. My parents,
they made a couple of trips. They came very early to the UK
and then my mum, they lived in Glasgow, which is where I should have been
brought up. My dad was one of the first orthodontists in
Glasgow, setting up things for the National Health Service because he was trained
at Harvard School of Dentistry with us and so he became an orthodontist. But
my mum said Britain was far too primitive. After a while they wanted
to go back to India, so they went back and then my mom
started. Hold on, hold on, give me a time context here, Nigel. We're
talking early 50s Harvard,
mid-50s Glasgow, back to India late at the
end of the Beginning of the 60s, three years, my dad was.
Set up the orthodontic department in this, in the, in, in, in Bombay, at the
dental school. Ah, so that's where it all starts, does it? And it all
starts there. When he. In India, they had a very
interesting system which was after independence, which was
people from the more deprived parts of society
without money, without education, would be given reserved
places, as at medical schools, universities,
dental schools. So all of a sudden all the rich people
who's expected their kids to become doctors and dentists and all those sort of things
were not getting places anymore. And that was the rules and that was
the law and my dad wanted to uphold it. So he
told me the story when I was quite young. He said that he was
being offered vast amounts of bribes to take in. People knew there was other
frauds going on with equipment at the, at the Dental school, right? So
he went to his good friend and boss at the time and
said, you know, I don't think we should take these bribes on behalf because it's
all breaking the rules and it's, it'll mess up the system. And his friend said,
no, no, no, you don't have to take the bribes. You're like a sort of
glorified collection agency that collects them on behalf of us who've been here for a
long time. He had spotted so much fraud going on. So in other words,
you haven't been here long enough to even think about keeping a bribe. Right.
You get a little bit. You get a little bit, mister. But the funny
thing about it is he, he left and
he, there was a guy, they were desperate for
dentists and doctors in the National Health Service in the early 60s, so
fantastic job in Sheffield and then moved to
Manchester, which is where I ended up. But he told me the story
and I think that is what actually shaped me because
even when I became an accountant, I started finding fraud
all the time because my dad spent all his time when he was in
the National Health Service trying to stop fraud and other
inefficiencies because he said, that just messes up the system. I love
it. So you really were
formed in terms of your philosophy and your
ethical values as a
direct result of what you forget about being
taught, what you saw in and what you absorbed and how
you, yes. How you saw your dad behaving in terms of,
I'm not going to participate in this corrupt
system. Therefore, was that the, or a motivator
for leaving India? Yeah, he left almost
on, he left almost on the day because they told him, you, you know,
you haven't really got a, you haven't really got a job here if you don't,
if you. Don'T do as we do, if you don't do this. Okay, but he,
he was very good. I mean, I've seen incidents later on. I was born after
he moved back the second time, but in Sheffield. But
after, after that, I do remember incidents where, when
the National Health Service was going through a sort of dentist and doctors can do
some private sessions, that was really opening the floodgates to people
doing their private sessions at the National Health Hospital. And I remember
one of his best friends had been doing this really
blatantly. He warned him twice and he said, look,
you cannot do this. And when the guy just
carried on, he made an anonymous report to, he
actually, and his friend got into trouble. But you read my mind because what
I was going to say is, it wouldn't take
a lot for somebody like your dad in India to have
come across that system and then said, not only am I not
participating, but I'm going to make an anonymous report.
But at that stage he didn't. In India, there was absolutely no
point. No point. Amazing. I went back to that same
dental hospital. It's the biggest government dental hospital in Mumbai
called St. George's and I went back there three weeks,
three, no, eight weeks ago. And
it's incredible, but there is a plaque put up in the orthodontic
department with a picture of my dad on it. And the people all know
the story. And Bombay is. Mumbai is one of the cities
where they really have tried to fight corruption. My goodness. And
they really try to work that because the city thinks of it like it's
a bit like New York. It's very collaborative. People have realized that corruption
destroys everyone's lives. Right. So they've been really fighting about
corruption in health, corruption in infrastructure. I was teaching
a course on fraud there. But when did, when did, when did your dad, how
old were you when your dad first told you this story about
not taking the golden, you know, the golden
bribe, as it were? Well, it was, I think I was seven years old.
I was flying from Bombay to, to London
on the first ever Air India 747. And I was so
excited about that, flying on the 747 for the first time. And
then someone comes up to. I was with my mom and someone comes up to
my mom and says, hello and nice to see you. And the guy was very
nice. And then he said, you know, you. And I was your dad's boss. When
I went back home, I said to dad, I met this really nice guy who
said he was your boss at the dental hospital. And then my dad took me
on a walk and he told me a story and that was the first time
at the age of seven. Now, what about other mini,
Mini Nigels? Do you have brothers and sisters and if so, what's
happened to them? Well, my sister is nine years older than me.
She's an awesome person. She became a dentist, which my dad
was very, very pleased with. But then she worked for the, the
dentalist, the, the authorities which investigate corrupt dentists
for 10 years. Oh, my God. So it really did.
Yeah. And she absolutely loved it. She got lots of dentists
struck off. Struck off. But then they changed the system
to a tick box system. So instead of sending qualified
dentists out to observe dentists in their
practices, they did a system of like, people sending this,
oh, I'm an okay person, code of conduct thing. And then the whole thing
became bureaucracy. So she took early retirement, I think, at
the age of, I think 56 or something, and
became a fully fledged dance teacher on cruise boats.
Oh, my God. I was just about to say don't tell me. She became an
actress, but not far different. So you both have got
this artistic. Not just streak, this
artistic skill set. And did you
see I can't dance to save my life. She's brilliant. But
I'm an. Absolutely. Can you. Can you sing? Can you sing? That's the
question. I think the two things I can do is I can play instruments.
So I can. Okay. I mean, I played in street bands, rock
bands. I still play stuff. Piano and flute.
I can sing really badly in choirs. Excellent. That's
a skill. But I think it's writing. It's creative writing, which was
my. I was. I could. Only it wasn't really my parents who
stopped me. It was when I was at school. I went to like a sort
of public school. It was a mixed public school, like Hogwarts in Manchester. Yeah. In
Cheadle Hume. It was in the south of Manchester. And it was. Beautiful thing,
castle and grounds, really. It's like Hogwarts. But one of the teachers told
me, told my parents at a parents meeting, do you speak
two languages at home? And they said, no, we just speak English because
we don't actually speak each other's Indian language. So they spoke English to each other.
They went to English schools. They said, because
it's very important that you don't teach him that because
he could either stammer and don't put him into sort of creative writing types
of things. And that teacher, in a
sense, colored my whole desire to do creative writing,
which I did in my spare time. So what was she alluding
to in terms of different writings? I was the only
foreign in the school, and she didn't know anything. She was a lovely teacher. She
was very nice to me, but she didn't. She was trying to sort of take
care of me in a sense, without realizing that I was actually just
a bit dyslexic. Oh, I see. So you. You did have something
that wasn't quite that she noticed that was different from the other kids.
Yeah. And she thought it might be something to do with not adjusting
to the English language. Correct. Actually, what
you were doing is you were starting to develop your artistic
writing skills. Yeah, I mean, I would say, you
know, going right long down the line. Fraud investigation is an art.
So I, I think all the way along I was very lucky to be
nudged into that via
accountancy. Of course. I was about to say, so you've got this
creative skill
and this creative urge and clearly you've got it in
music. You're playing in a rock band. I
can't wait for you to find a great photo of you
with, you know, your kipper Thai and your. And
I hope you had blue and red hair, but
had red hair. Once you. Then you then go from
that side into now. You're going to have to forgive me and I'll
probably get lots of complaints about this once
the podcast goes live. But apart from being a lawyer,
you could not have chosen a more boring profession and a
more rigid profession than accounting. So what on
earth did you fall on your head at that stage? What happened?
Well, actually when I was like 16 and then sort of band
stage and all that, my dad was very nice. He said, why don't you try
it out and see what it's like? And this was really interesting.
This is like 1980 in Manchester. You can imagine it was a pretty
grimy city at that time. Right. And it actually had
clothing factories like they have on Coronation Street. And
I was able to do summer jobs and sometimes at Easter for
his. My dad's. One of his good friends was a partner in a medium sized
firm. He was the senior partner in a firm called Joseph Crossley and Sons.
And it was a beautiful thing. We weren't even allowed to use calculators.
We were sent out and I was like a junior sent out on an audit.
So I was doing audits and things and I was very,
very driven and excited to do this. It was like. And how old were you?
I was 16 and a half or so. Okay, all right, 16.
And then I got sent out to do an audit with this, with this
senior who was called Ian and he must have been about 23. And.
And it was like of a clothing factory in Manchester where 300. It was
so amazing. It was like archetypal. What,
Coronation Street, 300 ladies working there and one guy in charge.
And I think I fell over a box in the room where
they put the auditors and underneath that box were all these wage
books for a night shift between something
like eight o' clock at night and four in the morning. And then when we
looked at the names, they were the illegal immigrant population,
Bangladeshis, Indians, Pakistan. Now this
is cliche, beyond cliche. I know. You actually
stumbled physically across the
evidence of some naughtiness. Correct. Well, I didn't really
stumble when it's the sort of thing that true. Well, you know, when
they put the auditors in a place to order. Anyone who's an auditor, who's from
my, my generation, they didn't actually have computers. You had to go and sit there
in the place. They would put them in the worst, most rat infested room possible.
But you had no idea. You were 16, you had no idea where to look.
You were walking around. Oh yeah, I had no idea. And you just fell over
something. So I was just using that example of where lots of people
might say, you know, I stumbled across this particular fraud.
But you physically stumbled, confronted and stumbled
this. And I love it. But I want to know why were you not doing
your work experience at your dad's surgery?
Oh, I did that on Saturday mornings. He had a private. He had a
practice on Saturday mornings as well. But I, I
didn't really find dentistry that exciting. My sister did.
My mother wanted me to do law, but I was dyslexic, so I couldn't read
long sentences at that time. Well, they didn't know. I mean, there
are a lot of people I know a lot. There are people I know who
went into law. But at that stage, maybe particularly in
Manchester, you just didn't come across people that knew how to deal with
dyslexia. Did they actually diagnose, if that's
the right word, dyslexia at that stage, I. Was diagnosed with mild
dyslexia. But I had a wonderful art cluster teacher when I
was 11 and she happened to be the art teacher teacher at the school. And
she said my handwriting's all over the place. So then she taught me
calligraphy and then my handwriting improved dramatically. Right.
And the only I. There's a book called the Dyslexic Advantage and I
think quite a lot of dyslexics can actually. So I can, I
can read a page of numbers or text and see everything. I can sort
of. You sort of scan or photograph the page. And I think that's
really helped with my fraud investigation skills is you can just
see massive amounts of things and then pick out the interesting things. I don't
think my dyslexia is really that obstructive
to normal life. Well, so people listening and watching
that, they'll get comfort from that. That doesn't really matter how you
start and what difficulties you have, particularly if it is
dyslexia, you can overcome them and you can give expression to
your, both your creative and your
fraud. Uncovering skill sets?
I think so. I think. For example, I read that Greta Thunberg calls her
autism her superpower. I see. Okay,
Okay, I get it. And we've
talked not one jot yet about a particular fraud
case, which, when I look at the time, I'm thinking, my God, your
history and your mixture of things that were
happening and guiding you is really
interesting because my life was relatively boring
in comparison. Comparison. But let's skip over
this wonderful dichotomy
between being Mr. Chef and Mr.
Screenwriter to going into accounting
fundamentally, or at least to a certain extent to keep Mum and
Dad happy. And you
leave school, you go to uni. I think you qualify
as a chartered accountant. Is that right? Well, I did Computer science is my degree.
That's right. Computer science. At which uni?
Manchester. At Manchester. So you. That's an interesting thing in itself.
Why didn't you want to go somewhere outside of Manchester
in 1982? The best
course that I could find, because it was. It was all about algorithms
and actually finding stuff and doing stuff, was at Manchester. And they were the biggest.
They were set up by Alan Turing. And I found out later, okay,
you can't cheat. And tell me that that's why you went there, because you realized
Turing had. Had set it up. No. Never mind.
Professors were his students. Did you live at home during
uni? No. No, I moved out straight away. My parents
wanted me to have a full university life, so I didn't.
It's just my home trip was a lot shorter than anyone else's.
Okay, now, before we are going to get to. I promise everyone,
you're gonna. We're gonna get to Nigel's unbelievably
varied experience and talent uncovering frauds. But
before I do, tell me something that you did,
like breaking into the headmasters or the senior
principal's office and stealing the exam papers. Tell me something that you
did that nobody else knows. And this is going to be a
revelation now for what you did at uni. I think
it was not really what we did at uni, because that was all quite
interesting and fun. But the craziest thing I did was there was a TV program,
and it showed about the collective scenes in Berlin.
And one morning I decided it was a good idea with a friend
to hitchhike all the way from Manchester to Berlin.
And this is like when the Wall was up and everything. But that was not
the interesting bit. The interesting bit is that I decided to go into the
East. This is where it got really interesting. I decided to go into the east
with a friend. And then we thought, because we were both street musicians at the
time, we thought, wouldn't it be nice if they heard some music that they'd never
heard before? But not in the area where you're supposed to go. But we actually
took an intercity TR towards Magdeburg, which was way in the
DDR, and we went there. How did you get in? How did they let you
in? Well, you can get in through the. You're allowed to go for the day
and then you spend a lot of money and you have to. They give you
a little map in a very small region of East Berlin. I see, okay. And
we thought, well, no one's checking. And I could speak some bad German, so let's
take it into city, train all the way out. We went to Potsdam and we
were playing and everyone ran away from us. And then one
guy came up to us and with a. He had a violin case and he
actually was a violinist. And he said, said, are you not
from here? And we said, no. He said, I play in an
orchestra in Halle in eastern Germany, and I speak not the Halle
in Manchester, but in actually the city of Halle. And he said, I speak
English. What are you doing here? And we said, we just kind of came
to see what it's like. He said, you're not allowed to be here. He will
arrest you and they'll throw you in jail as spies
because you have come here completely illegally. He said, have you eaten them? We said,
well, we're going to buy some. He said, don't buy any food. Have my food.
Go back, you've got a return ticket. Get back. And do not speak to
each other. And if anyone comes near you make up a language.
Excellent. But you were there completely lawfully or had you
strayed into a deeper part that you didn't have access rayed into the
DDR? What I learned about it was one thing.
I learned that everyone at that time was basically encouraged to blow the
whistle on each other. And that's why I'm not today
a huge fan of whistleblower cultures, because I think I've
seen the worst, the most, I would say the most
absurd a whistleblower culture can get, which was the DDR
towards the middle and end of the 80s. Right. And I would say that
I don't agree with huge whistleblower cultures. That's
why everything is about find the frauds before the poor sod has
to actually blow the whistle. Right. That's
interesting. And okay, so that's a really
interesting. It's not something that necessarily would have got you kicked out of
uni, but it would have been a bit embarrassing had you had to have
telephoned home and said, mum and dad, I'm now in an East German
prison. That's where I'm going to finish my degree from.
So that still classifies as pretty interesting. So
you've left uni, you've managed not to get either
recruited by the. By the German
East German intelligence. You are looking
for your first job. Where was that? In a pretty run of the
mill accounting firm in Manchester. One of the big four today.
Working in the big four accountancy firm. And when you walked in for your interview,
tell me this, do you remember what you were wearing? Let's just go with clothes
for the moment. I was wearing a silver gray, a gray suit, which was one
of these cheapo suits that you get which shines a little bit. Okay,
excellent. And you were living at home at the time, or had
you moved out. That was already living at uni. You, you go for the interviews?
Of course. You go before you've left. Okay, so
when you had that interview, did the person,
do you remember who it was that interviewed you? Oh, yes,
Lovely guy called Richard Dyson who became head of the president
of the Institute of Charter Counselor and he was known by his nickname was
Bomber. And. Yeah. Do you
remember the name? I don't, but I'm thinking of, of course, Mr. Dyson with
the com of the home appliance
skills. But I don't think this is the same one. No, he wasn't.
Awesome guy. And I don't know why I got on well with him. He seemed
like a guy who would get things done and he did. And he just gave
me the job on the spot, basically. And did you share with him
that you had this innate. You had this
innate ability to discover frauds? I don't think I told him I
had the natability because I had simply just fallen over a few before. I
told him I had this passion to do it. And he said two
things. He said, we actually want people like that. And he said, you've got a
computer science degree. No one else has got one of those. You can actually look
at all the transactions in an audit. This is what we're trying to do
and we'd like you to find. And we're very happy if you find stuff. And
he never went away from that. Excellent.
And how long were you at this big Four, four, four, four,
four. Three and a half years. Okay. I did
my chartered accountancy, qualified everything first time Mum and Dad were really happy.
I'm sure they were. And then I suddenly felt the need
to leave. Right. Because.
Simply because auditing isn't about finding fraud, even though they
say it. And there are some people who want it. There were definitely some partners
like Bomber Dyson, another brilliant guy called John Dixon, who's had a
national comp. They supported, you know, this, let's do
proper auditing and find stuff. But there was a huge wave in the
profession to not find stuff. So
this audit function, which you and I have seen
in various different times of our career,
was not designed to find fraud. It was designed to employ
people and to keep the money flowing. Is that it? I
discovered on a, on a, on a, on a major audit, quite a big hole
in the balance sheet, let's say. And one of the managers, I remember taking me
out for a very nice lunch and after I was not allowed to be in
the closing meeting and that wasn't taken forward. And he simply said, you're doing
very well, you're very good at your top of your grade, but you have
to stop finding fraud on every audit. Because the purpose of an audit
is to check that things are okay. And then he let
loose with the other one is. And it pisses our clients
off. And it's not always something we
have to find. And nobody else in your grade
finds these things like you do. And I explained, well, I use a computer and
I look at the transactions and they laughed. And
then at that point I realized that was the, that was the,
that was the mood. It wasn't these two or three people who I thought were
fantastic, the mood in the whole profession was let's not find
stuff. Yes. And we both know,
sadly, even in this day and
age, and of course it's a human business
dynamic that is not peculiar to any one
society or to any one time in society, which
is if you find a fraud,
somebody is going to have to take the rap for it. Even if they weren't
the person necessarily responsible for doing it.
They were or possibly were the person that should have spotted it.
So they don't want you to dig up any dirt. Secondly,
it could very well have an impact on the finances of the company
and make it difficult to sustain salaries or
whatever it is, certainly their profit. And thirdly,
it could have a direct impact on,
on their ability to carry on doing the job and the
company's ability to survive. So I'm sure there are others, but
that hasn't changed to this day and age. And that's why
you And I see, I guess lots of cases with IPOs in particular,
that the auditors and the accountants get sued
because they haven't been looking for the real or
they haven't been disclosing what they found. Yeah, I think it's a
mixture. Sometimes they find stuff by accident and then
don't disclose it. But most of the time today nobody
looks. In the old days when I was auditing, we'd go to factories, we'd go
to banks, we'd look around. I'd walk around the trading floor listening to
conversations. Sometimes I'd be a bit, as they told me, I was a bit too
enthusiastic that I'd stay late and I'd not log my hours. But
I'd look at people's expenses and go through their desks a little bit or what's
on the top of the desks and things. I was a bit too driven for
it. But it's just that business today, nobody looks
these days. They tick boxes. So it's like these terms
and conditions we're supposed to read, but we tick an electronic box and the
whole world has become so electronic that nobody reads
anymore. So I think it's got a lot worse.
And these poor auditors and even lawyers that have to do due
diligence or they haven't got a chance, they've got
no chance. And of course nobody wants them to look either.
Nobody says, oh, by the way, would you like to have a tour on a
Saturday of the whole building and go through everything you want? We'll happily open
up everything. It's all about data rooms and documents
that are supplied in nice, you know, gift wrap packages which are perfect
to audit. Yes. And they've been scrutinized and sanitized
before they enter the data room. So it's, it's, it's
the, whatever it is, it's not a true and faithful record
of, of the entire picture of the
way in which a company operates. Yeah, I think it's the difference between
accounting, which is all the little details are, and the numbers and
the documents and accounts. People think they're the same thing. Whereas
accounts are the sanitized version. Yes. So you
leave the big four having realized that maybe the,
the culture is not necessarily one that
you feel comfortable in. And you go, where? What's your first job?
Well, my first job was again by accident. I happened to
meet the head of internal audit of Norway's largest
company, 40,000 people, industrial, a bit of
financial chemicals, oil, fertilizers all around the world. And
he meets one of the partners at EY that knows me really well
and says to. And, and they. And he says, I've got a job, a guy
who'll just fit your bill. And this guy's into fraud
investigations, stuff involving Mark Rich, the metals trader.
And he just meets me and he meets me in a Lebanese restaurant in London
because I was working in London at the time, right? And he takes me to
dinner and essentially offers me a job on the spot
and then says, well, you've got to come to Norway to meet a couple of
the big wigs. Which, all right, they just offered me a job and,
and I was so in love with the Scandinavian
culture because I traveled there as a musician and played a bit of jazz there
and things. And I just thought, what a lovely part of the world
I'll live in any of the cities. I even live in Helsinki. But the language
is too difficult, right? So I promised I'd learn the language and I'd go to
either Stockholm. Oslo or Copenhagen's nice, but it's not got mountains, so.
And that's what you did? You picked up and you left?
Yep. What did mum and dad think about that?
Well, they, they were to blame because my dad's. One
of my dad's best friends is an orthodontist in, in, in Norway
and they'd taken me many times as a child on holiday. We got on holidays
and then I started going on my own. So they kind of went, well, we
introduced you to this God forsaken place which they loved. So we
can't really hate the fact that you're moving there. Plus there's lots of flights there
because Norwegians are absolutely crazy about football. So there are lots of flights
from Oslo to Manchester. And did I understand or hear
you correctly that you offered, did they
ask you to learn Norwegian or you had to in order to take that job?
No, I offered. I offered. I did a lingophone course
before I came. Of course it was about 40 years out of date, so
they said some of the things you say sound like someone who's about 50
years older than us at the moment. But you, you mastered it,
so you are fluent. I mean, I know you live there. No, no, I,
I mean I, I started the work there on day one, but I
didn't understand Norwegian well enough to understand all the different dialects. So I actually
rudely asked someone with a dialect to speak proper Norwegian. Police.
That's not done over there. Because they're not over here. Because in Norway
people, they celebrate dialects. But you didn't just so That I can
get this straight. You didn't actually need. They didn't say to
you can have this job, but you need to speak Norwegian. They were quite
happy for an English speaking dude to come out and to help them.
Yeah, they said the corporate language is English. The only thing is that when you
get into the meetings at that time in 89, the corporate, the language
that everyone spoke was Norwegian. And I think it was just. It's an easy language
to learn. It's a very beautiful language. So it's that easy to learn. It means
that you can also understand Swedish, Danish and that's it really.
But it's pretty good. And now you are totally fluent. I imagine
having lived there so long. If my daughter's watching, I cannot admit to be
totally fluent, but I think I'm totally fluent.
Excellent, excellent. So you're working for this
company and culturally, do you learn anything
about the different approach
that different cultures have towards fraud, dishonesty,
whistleblowing? What do you learn about humanity and cultures when
you're in, when you're in Oslo? Well, the beauty
about my job was I traveled most places, lots of places in the world with
North Skydra in the seven years I worked there. But the Norwegian cultures,
heavily, heavily, heavily based on trust, I think
that's the word that they would embrace. Of course the problem with
that is it can also lead to false trust or naivety.
So I would say that they were very open to finding things,
but what they were very good at was not having a blame culture.
They were a bit like the aircraft crash investigation industry where they said,
let's try to sort out what's the root cause. And the root cause
could be that someone got leaned on, someone got tempted.
So I found it very nice and refreshing from my
UK days where I felt there was, as you said,
someone needs to take the wrap. I felt there was an open
mindedness to sometimes people
make stupid mistakes and
let's try to work it all out together. So there was a very collab. I
felt the Scandinavian way of working on problems was very collaborative and I really,
really enjoyed that. But was there any, was there any
difference, having worked with many different cultures,
any difference in the way they thought about
levels of dishonesty? Were, were fiddling
your expenses? Were. Was there anything that
would have been strange somewhere else that was accepted in
Oslo? I think the thing that was strange
was they hadn't started it then, but the
Scandinavian countries all thought that they didn't have corruption and fraud.
So we had to sort of invent it in A way
that actually we have a massive oil industry and there's plenty of fraud and corruption
there. And that there's. So we had to sort of invent the term and the
top management were essentially Scandinavians. So.
But they were very open minded to. It does happen.
But we had to sort of. We had to. We had to. It
wasn't like a give. It wasn't like a, oh, there is fraud. Like there was
in the. In the uk, people just accepted it happened. I think Mike
Comer's favorite expression, shit happens and so does fraud,
wasn't the relevant expression. That was the biggest. Why explain to
me why would they have this almost
ostrich like attitude towards fraud. I
think it was because when I came to the country, people would leave their doors
open, people would leave their cars unlocked. And this is in the big cities. Right.
People have this high level of trust and.
But it started creeping in. I think the. I came in on the back of
a massive fraud involving Mark Rich and aluminum. And that was what
kind of woke up Norse Hydro, the big company that this
does happen. So. But I think it's like it doesn't happen on
our patch. Was a little bit of the mentality at that time. Right.
Changed quite quickly, though. And what was the most
interesting and if you can, the
most. And one of the largest
or most
complicated cases you worked on at Norse Hydro.
I probably can't speak about most of those, but
I suppose there was various different things that we worked on
all over the world. I'd say there was stuff in the oil industry
related to purchasing.
There was. The police got. The police got very savvy in investigating
corruption and fraud in the oil industry. And I would say. But I say
the most public one of them all was that the company was very
acquisitive and this one's public. So it acquired big
companies in different parts of the world. Yeah. And they acquired one that took
its business in the fertilizer industry stellar and it just took it
global and became a global player. But they had. They had inherited
a culture from one part of the world where people paid bribes all the time
to build businesses and then took some of it for themselves. And that
came to bite the company in the bum a few about 10 years later
after I'd left. But I remember we took it up with the management
and they went, yeah, but that's the way they do things down there. And
that was the big mistake to say, okay, if they're selling
big into Africa or if you're selling big into the Asia that's the way
they do business there. That is such a mistake
because your people will be taking some of that business, that money as
well. Absolutely. And of course you're exposing yourself to all sorts
of bribery which they then had to deal with later on. Not
surprising. So you do a few
years in Oslo and then you come across the lovely
Mike comer. Correct. In 1993 or something,
or 1992, I can't remember which year it was now exactly. But very, very early
on I came across Mike. Mike's teaching a three
day course. I get sent on it. Right. There's two guest lecturers who are
brilliant. One's called Martin Savachick and the other one's called Gary Miller. I
doubt it, but there you go. Anyway, so you were this thing and what did
you learn? What was the biggest thing you came away with after seeing
Mike and listening to him? Attention to detail.
Now you asked me. It's attention to detail, which was the
slogan of Mike's company at the time, but I didn't know that it was at
the time, but it was. If you see something
and it makes you think, I've got a bad feeling about this,
have a look, be curious. And I went back
after that course on Monday and I was doing
an audit of procurement in oil fields and I spotted things the
same day just because I had a different mindset. It was like
the course with Mike was like brainwashing, turn you into an investigator,
but also extremely enjoyable.
And you, you did, you did some very cool stuff about law as well. Which.
The bottom line is that Mike really, he,
he just energized
that, apart from energized the space around him, but
he energized and made
investigating fraud sexy in the sense of it
was fun, you could make a decent living out of it.
And it was something, as you
witness, that was not spoken about. And he
made it, he made it cool to be
a person that found out about other people's wrongdoing,
whereas there was probably part of that, oh, they're rats, they're
whistleblowers, they're whatever. Somebody that went in
deliberately and consciously to find out who was responsible for something
was becoming a really acceptable
and indeed a necessary part of business life.
Absolutely. I didn't even know anything like that existed.
And then my boss was fantastic and he eventually said to
me, look, it seems to me where your heart is. And I was
also reaching the point, the seven year point, where I was feeling that management
wanted to give me a job, but they wanted me to go but
don't keep looking for fraud. And I felt, here we go again.
So that was when I just ran. You're
obsessed with fraud. I love it. So did
you ever get into. And I found myself
in a very kind of tangential way, but did you ever
find yourself in a picture, in a position where somebody
actually suspected you of maybe helping out
the fraudsters or not coming clean fully?
Did you ever get that into that position where the people
either were so skeptical or there was something that they didn't feel
comfortable about what you were doing? No, I didn't. But
there was a moment where I didn't feel comfortable about what I was doing.
Okay. It was investigating.
This was when I moved out Mosk Hydro and became an investigator
partly for Network and then Mike Combs company and then a company called Hydas. And
it was during the Hybe stage where we. There was
a case with a whistleblower and it was in the Ukraine. And
it was clearly that. What seemed to have happened was the company that
our client had set up, the subsidiary had been actually
stolen from them and was put in a new name. So it was called.
It's the Russian word, riderstro, which is the theft of the
entire business. But the blame was being put on a
person who was the former finance director, who also sent
in all sorts of papers to the head of internal audit in
Ukrainians, saying, but I'm just a whistleblower, I'm trying to. And he was blaming the
head of the company. But the head of the company was one of our. One
of the boys, one of the people. He was an expat. They all
trusted him. Right. So I was asked by the head of the audit, can you
just have another look? And this has been. So I went down to the Ukraine
and the only way I could find this person was to pay some money
to someone who would make sure that they. When they. When his
mobile phone was switched on for a few seconds every day it was pinged and
he was way, way out in. In the sticks in Uman in the south, south
of Kiev. So went out there, found the guy,
paid a bribe. And the time I. It came back to me to haunt me
was when I was. And we found the story, we got the evidence, we
found what was the real issues. It was. It was a well done case by
the client. When I was leaving the Ukraine, it was in 2003 at Boris Pol
Airport, I was put into a room for an hour and they took my
passport, their phone and everything off me and just didn't I
wasn't allowed to speak. It was nothing. It was just taking everything, my coat, my
bags, everything. They just put me in a room and then I think five minutes
before the plane, they let me go. And the reason was, it was they were
giving me a warning that I had done something. In that
case, I'd messed around with some organized criminals who were involved in this, but which
I didn't know. But of course it came back to haunt me and it haunts
me ever because I did pay a bribe. Why? Just help
me here. Why did you need to pay a bribe? Because the person, he was
at the top of the criminal gang, as it were, he was inaccessible.
Is that it? Well, no, it was to find the whistleblower.
Had gone to find the whistleblower. He'd been beaten up and he'd gone into hiding
at some relative's house way south of Kiev, like
200 miles south. And, and our investigative
partner, who was an excellent guy, said, the only way we're going to be able
to find him is if I can lubricate the wheels so that the mobile
telephone company will actually find him.
And so in other words, I did something completely to break the
law. Right. Took a personal risk because,
and I keep telling myself, because I knew this guy was in trouble, I saw
all his paperwork, I realized he was the honest guy. I had to find him,
we had to have a sit down meeting, I had to see him in the
eyes. And then we eventually got him protection and help and everything.
But the thing that haunts me all the time is I broke the law
and I could have ended up back like East Germany. I could have ended up
stuck in, in the Ukraine in 2003 for a very long time.
You could have done. But I handed over an envelope with some dollars in it,
quite a lot. For people who, because you and I have got a
similar ethical framework for
people like us. You would have at the time,
and from what you said you did, you, you didn't characterize that at
the time as a bribe because it wasn't you paying
someone money in order for them ultimately
to benefit you. Well, I guess in a way it was so that you could
uncover you were on the, you were on the scent, weren't you? You could have
said, you could have said, look, I can't
solve this case by paying this because it would breach the
law in wherever I am and I've just got to go home and leave
things as they are. But you were so committed, you had to do
it, didn't you? You've got me. You see, for years I've been telling myself
the rationale that I did it to save this guy Maxim's life. Yes.
But I recently I've been teaching, we've been
teaching business ethics at the business schools and one of the master's students,
one of the things you do is you try to work out something you've done
where you really did realize you crossed the line. And this is one of them
where I actually just wanted to be the. Hero and everyone,
you know, you and I are, as my late
departed father said, old enough and ugly enough to be able to face
our little demons or even our big demons. And
everybody at some stage crosses a
line. And the question is the difference between
those that are, are doing crossing the line for
an ultimate
beneficial purpose for somebody else, for another company to
save a life, to uncover something wicked. There
is a difference there. And you can't justify it in
philosophical terms because two rights don't, two wrongs don't make a
right, etc. But a lot of people in the game that you and I are
in understand it because we are taking risks every
single day, aren't we? Well, yeah, if you do investigation,
which involves being on the ground and it involves meeting people, not this, not these
days. Investigations are done through paperwork. If you actually then,
then sometimes you are taking a risk. I mean, you take a risk when you
cross the road. So I, I, I think it's, I think
artists take risks. I don't think I've done stage diving, but
artists take risks by putting yourself on the
line. And I think this was a case where I put myself the line. I
don't regret what I did because it really led to a solution. But I like
to talk about it because I would like people who in the same situation to
think twice, which I didn't do. Well, I think that's wise advice.
But I think that even when you've thought once, twice and
thrice, there are certain times in life where
you've just got to be true to who you are.
And for me, that was one of your moments. Now we really have
moved faster than I thought. But what I do, I don't want to do is
miss out on another really
interesting case called the Trust 4 case.
Now, Trust or sorry, that shows you how well I know it.
I don't want you to name any of the law firms involved,
but what I would like you to do is tell me about your role in
uncovering it and what it was and how you played a
part in uncovering it and finding out where the money was.
Okay, this, the case is very interesting because it involves.
Involves a few interesting people. It involves a now deceased
ex British lord. I mean every good British story should involve a lord, whether it's
Luke. And this one was called Lord Mo and his name was Jonathan Guinness.
And he isn't the criminal in a sense.
Let's. Then what actually
happened was I was asked. We were asked. I was working in Network and I
was running Mike Coma's company Network. I was running Network
Scandinavian subsidiaries. So I'd gotten there and worked there for a while and then I
decided to set up their Scandinavian subsidiary with lots of support. So
myself and another super guy called Matt Gilliam were working there with others
and we were basically given a piece of referred
work which was a client of the law firm who
disliked intensely for some reason, a lawyer called Lindsay Smallbone,
who was a New Zealand lawyer, but he was. And he
wanted the law firm to employ investigators to find out
the dirt on this guy. Let's put it in simple terms. So
what we did is Network started doing their research on him and they found out
that amongst other business interests he was managing director of a company in
Sweden. And it was a big company,
but the managing director and they understood the cases
that actually he was only managing director because he'd been placed, placed
there by Lord Moyne, Jonathan Guinness, who had bought the company
and, and essentially bought a controlling stake of a stock
exchange listed company in Sweden. Now there were some
rumors going on that Lord Moyne was a bankrupt
lord and he didn't have a penny to his name. He was also, there was
rumors that he was an outcast from the Guinness family. And there were plenty of
rumors about Smallbone, Mr. Smallbone being a little bit of a dodgy person.
Anyway, we were asked to look into it and we went up to the company's
register because nothing was online those days. And we went up to the company's register
and asked a colleague to copy absolutely every single paper
that's been registered with the. With the company house in Sweden. In Sweden.
Okay. And I was then, because I read
Swedish, I was given the chance to actually, Matt said, you better look at
all these nudge. So I went through this pile of papers and in
fact the dyslexia comes in handy. So I'm flicking through the papers and I
noticed that the consideration, the amount of money that was paid
seemed to be in a. In a board meeting note paid to the major
controlling owner of the stock exchange company. After
six months or so A few months after the actual deal had been sealed
and the new owners had come in, which is for me is the wrong way
around, because you pay. The owner should be paid before. So then
we looked at it a bit more and then I looked at the. The newspaper
and found out, yes, this is really still a stock exchange listed company.
And I thought, based on what I know, dodgy lord,
dodgy lawyer company
with a lot. The other thing I noticed is in the accounts, there was a
massive amount of cash on the balance sheet. So I thought,
something doesn't add up here. I went over and I said he was showing
me how companies, Swedes, get defrauded because he said, they're a
bit naive. Rich Swedes get defrauded by overseas companies
that then ask you to invest and then they lose all the money. And I
asked him this naive question, what if the company was already on the Swedish
stock exchange? Now, he was a policeman who read body language
and language. So well, he shut the door and he said, nigel, you
need to tell me the name of this company. And I said, well, I can't
because we're working for lawyers and their lawyers are privileged to the client.
So then I think we rang the lawyers, the lawyers range the
client, and the client said, well, if this is going to make Smallbone look bad,
it's great for me, right? So we said, tell them everything.
So we did. And two weeks later they'd done a raid. They'd found out
that 650 million kroner or so been transferred to the
Cayman Islands by then, but not all of it. So they managed to
stop the rest of the fraud. They managed to file a case
which went reasonably well. They managed to find who was the main
perpetrator, which was a young Swedish guy called Joachim Posner,
who changed his name to Joe Falk and essentially got the
whole thing to work, got Moyne in place, got Smallburn in place, stolen the
money, wired it to the Cayman Islands via Barclays and then
what was. The sort of core of the fraud? Was he
just simply stealing the money and paying off people
not to pick it up, is that it? Yeah, paying off people to do their
work. So Smallbone got paid, Lord Moyne got paid. I see. And
then he stole the money. And essentially it's going to be in the
Netflix documentary that's coming out in about three months time. And he's
going to be the star of the documentary because he managed to stay away
from Sweden and not in hiding for 10 years. And this
is his name, is his. Current name Joachim Posner. And
he uses his current name, Joachim Posner. Unbelievable.
And he now lives a free man in Sweden. Yeah. And plays golf.
Golf. And, oh, his family play golf. Have you gone to meet
him and explain to him that you love to meet him? You would love
to. Well, let's hope that we can orchestrate a meeting between you.
And he actually did. Oh, no, he didn't do any time.
No, he didn't do any time. He was in. Sweden's a very lenient country. You
know, he did his 10 years in hiding or so and then when he came
back, he's living a free man. Didn't anyone sue him? You know,
in other countries people would kill him, but.
But nobody sued him, Nobody decided take action and
pursue him across the world? Couldn't after that? No. And no one could
find him. So he. Oh, I see. I was about to say, did anyone have
any idea where he was living or, or did he just disappear like Lord
Lucan? He disappeared like Lord Lucan and then
miraculously appeared some years, many years later. Later.
But you know, in, in many ways he showed what a
huge loophole there was because people allowed, allowed,
they allowed anyone to any company that to be bought by anyone.
All they needed to do was give him the right paperwork and the fact that
he was a lord as well made it all hunky dory. And he showed
a loophole. And I think there since then the defenses to
stop criminals seizing assets and
doing things like that have been so much improved, he has probably saved the
nation of Sweden hundreds of times more. Oh,
don't use that explanation because he'll come back as a hero. Nigel.
The question is that's what if we. No, but the thing is the Swedes were
brilliant. They learned from it. They had this, they had this full report to understand
what went wrong and why and then put in the control, put in the safeguards
in place, which I thought was the best bit. Well, I know
you are tight for time today, so we won't stretch as I
try and do with some of my fungible
guests. So I'm going to say what an amazing experience. You and
I had a pretty pre podcast chat
yesterday and even with that, we haven't
even scratched the surface of the life and
times of Nigel Aya. So I want to say thank you. Oh,
but before we do go, we do have to
just make a few comments about what
you're doing now because you are very much in the thick of
things. Yeah. About five years ago,
just before COVID I thought, I've developed tools I've got this
strange set of skills, which is educational skills, programming,
algorithm skills to find fraud. I always thought I was a genius at finding fraud.
And then I realized you can teach anyone to do it and everyone can be
a fraud detective. So I wrote a book called
Recipes for the Aspiring Fraud Detective. And then someone said, why didn't
you turn that into a product so that everyone can.
Because it's a bit like everyone can cook. I actually believe anyone
can cook. You just have to feel the confidence to do it. It's the same
thing with fraud detection. Anyone can detect fraud. You just have to want to. So
I created. We created a tool and the idea was based on that
whistle experience that you can't crowd the world with whistleblowers
because you're just creating a lot of people who are going to be
miserable. What you've got to do is find the fraud before the whistleblower.
Or as Mike would have, Mike Comer would have said, before the shit hits the
fan. I mean, Mike's phrase, which I like to quote him on, the
shit happens and so does fraud. But you don't have to let that hit the
fan. So we created a company called B4 with the
letters B4 for find fraud before it gets
out of control or, you know, find it. It's like they say in the
uk, transport, see it, say it sorted. So when
the company is called before. Or just before, I mean, we've got
some idiot decided to call it B4 investigate, which was me when we.
When we founded it. And I just feel that we're not really an investigation
company. We're a company that helps people build their resilience
by finding the stuff early. A bit like good tests,
medical tests. So you are still very much in the game,
Nigel. You are still developing, you're still creating,
and I'm looking forward to
another episode with you where we can talk about
some other cases that you did along the way and also some of the stuff
that you've been able to achieve while at B4.
So before you. Haha. Before
you get upset with me, I am going to say thank you very much.
I really appreciated your time and your energy
and I'm really looking forward to releasing this and I will let you
know when it goes. Live life. Thanks very much, Gary. I enjoyed it.
Yeah, take care, buddy. Cheers. Thank you for
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