Original subtitles

On a June morning in 2010, in a fine Georgian mansion over

Merrion Square, the management

of Custom House Capital made their way to the first floor boardroom.

They were gathering for the last installment of a team

building exercise.

The management team was led by CHC's directors, Harry Cassidy,

the Chief Executive, John White,

the Investment Director, and John Mulholland,

who had set up the firm with Cassidy a decade previously.

Cassidy presented the analogy of a castle on a hill,

a vision of what CHC would become.

It was a cham. Cassidy's Castle on the Hill

was more like pie in the sky.

The Office of the Financial Regulator,

on which CHC depended for its licence to operate,

wanted to get rid of Cassidy.

It feared for the safety of funds that clients had entrusted to CHC.

The stuff going on in the background,

Custom House Capital's dark secret was that it was stealing

from its client's accounts.

(INTRIGUING MUSIC PLAYS)

REPORTER: Some of those who lost money in the collapse

of Custom House Capital in 2011 came to court for

today's sentencing.

Judge Orla Crowe said she had read more than 200 victim impact

statements from former clients.

Most were hardworking people who had carefully put aside

money for their retirement.

How did the central bank go into that company in 2009?

And those people were able to continue to do what they did.

I don't think our investment went bad because it was

a bad investment. I think our investment went bad

because bad people took our money and did bad things with it.

It's kind shocking, really, when you think about it.

I'd feel better if I'd been scammed by a fella on the

end of the phone.

The prosecution received victim impact statements

from 197 people. Many of those who lost life savings

they thought they had invested

for their retirement came to court for the sentence hearing.

What we had worked hard for all those decades was squandered

by a handful of people.

Some of their husbands committed suicide.

Some people just gave up.

I knew the life she'd lived and how hard she'd worked

and her health condition.

And to say to her, Helga, all your money is gone

just down a black hole by a guy that you trusted with your life.

The first email I got off the guards,

it was addressed to dear victim, and that hit me.

Being called a victim.

When you think about the scale of what was before us

at the investigation stage, where there's potentially

2,700 investors, tens of millions of euros misappropriated.

The Book of Evidence alone ran into seven and a half

thousand pages.

It was an absolute huge investigation.

REPORTER: The new Dundrum town centre stands on an 18 acre site.

The first phase has taken almost five years to complete,

and local people queued from early morning to get their

first look inside.

I just want to see the shop, see all the nice things

that's in the shop.

At 10 o'clock, the waiting ended.

I never thought I could live to either see the luas

or to see this centre. It's absolutely marvelous.

I had set up a business in 1995.

So by the time 2005 and 2006 came along.

The country was singing.

The company was doing well, and I was in a position to decide

what I wanted to do with that money.

Was I going to go mad and buy an Aston Martin,

or would I be sensible and put it into a pension fund?

So a pension fund is what I ended up doing.

The arrival of American multinationals had

begun in a big way, and then things were moving

forward, and they were moving forward most

clearly in the property area.

What was going on in Ireland at the stage was you buying

something today and you were selling it a month later,

30 % more than you bought it for, and all this carry on.

This morphed into a classic financial bubble,

where I haven't taken part in the bubble,

but my neighbour next door is now driving a spanking big new car,

and they're away on holidays half the time.

And my wife is looking at me saying, what's wrong with us?

It's because we're not in property.

Well, I had a pension adviser.

Most of the property opportunities in Dublin, certainly,

a lot of them were taken up.

So he had said to me, there's this company has set up

called Custom House Capital, and they were looking at investing

in property outside of Ireland.

TAPE: Established in 1997, Custom House Capital is one

of Ireland's most dynamic wealth management companies,

and currently manages over 1 billion euros on behalf

of clients.

Their sales pitch was aggressive returns and growth.

That was the pitch.

So they went for that quite strongly, and it worked,

and people were attracted by it.

My aunt was born in a city called Kiel in northern Germany.

It's on the Baltic. She was born in 1928.

The war broke out when she was 11 years old.

She lost her mother at 12 years of age in the back of a truck,

bombed out city.

Her father was quite elderly, so she became a carer for him.

My uncle, and he met this at that stage, 17-year-old beautiful girl.

Her father accepted my uncle because he was Irish

rather than English.

They married some years later and they rebuilt a little shop.

And she worked in that shop for 50 years, six in in the morning

'till six in the evening.

She loved Ireland, particularly Connemara.

So they sold their business, brought their money to Dublin,

put in the Guinness Mahan Bank, which was the place if you

had a lump sum at the time.

She met Harry Cassidy there.

He was obviously dealt with her money.

So he came from a business culture that would have been...

probably, c avalier is probably the best term I could use

to describe it. He came from Guinness & Mahon,

which was Des Traynor,

who was Charles Haughey's accountant,

and I think, Ansbacher Accounts and offshore money.

REPORTER: The afternoon, Sandra Kells of Guinness &

Mahon Bank was explaining how they became imbriled

with the Pruner brothers, Fernando and Andreas,

who ran an organised crime ring in Miami, Florida.

There was that business culture at the time that he'd

sprung up out of as well.

He came in strong in the '70s and '80s. He was an ambitious guy.

He was known as a business development guy,

not a technocrat, and that stood to him in those times.

The business was founded by my grandfather in 1949.

It was a drinks wholesale business, serving pubs and clubs

and hotels in County Kildare.

Both my dad and his brother

and my grandfather ran the business successfully

for a long number of years.

They had an accountant and Roy advised them to start planning for

post-retirement or for the future.

Introduced them to Jamal Holland and Harry Cassidy.

Harry was in Guinness and Mahon at the time, the bank,

and some investments were made, obviously,

and they grew quite well.

I was with the Investment Bank of Ireland.

My husband also worked in the same institution, which,

to quote the promo at the time, was the merchant banking arm

of the Bank of Ireland Group.

So that was the start of the relationship with Harry.

He was with the Investment Department for quite

a few years, and then he left

and he went to Guinness & Mahon.

To best my knowledge, he didn't have a college education.

He did the Institute of Taxation exams and excelled at them

as far as I'm aware.

But yeah, so he would have been straight out of school

and into the bank.

He did have a great way with clients,

very good way with clients, and clients trusted them.

I had transferred funds that I had come into as a result

of the death of my husband.

I transferred those to Guinness, Mahon under Harry's guidance,

if you like.

And you trusted him? Oh, implicitly.

Implicitly

Like a lot of Irish people at the time,

it was based on relationships.

It was based on trust. It was based on a point of contact.

I suppose maybe 20 or 30 or 40 years before that,

if you were a small town business person in Ireland,

if the bank manager came to you and said,

you should invest in this product,

that's what you did because you trusted a bank manager.

1980s, 1990s, there was a lot of big institutions

that would have an investment in pension management.

The economy was becoming buoyant and probably thought,

Why am I working here?

Or why am I giving two-thirds of this away when, theoretically,

I could set up my own shop, keep it for myself,

and build out a business that's going to be worth

something down the line?

Harry was great fun, very good sense of humour, short fuse.

When he exploded, he exploded.

He had a bit of the small man syndrome.

What he didn't have in stature, he made up for in taxation

expertise, running into investment expertise,

and arrogance.

TAPE: Hi, Harry Cassidy

from Custom House Capital Limited with another thought for the day.

Did you know that Donald Trump is worth around $2. 6 billion,

and that if you laid his money

in dollar bills end-to-end, it would stretch all the way

to the moon with a bit to spare.

So what does this have to do with Custom House Capital Limited?

Well, chances are you feel your pension fund

wouldn't even stretch into the middle of next week,

which is why it would be a rather good idea to call us today.

Custom House Capital Limited is regulated by the financial

regulator under Section 10 of the Investment

Intermediaries Act, 1995.

Because I'd obviously dealt with him in Guinness Mahon,

they thought Harry is the man.

So they sent their money forward to Dublin with the intention

of buying a house here or building a house.

So she trusted him implicitly.

They had strong brands and relationships coming

from Guinness and Mahon and a few other institutions.

So they came together as John Mulholland,

who was a non-executive director and a chairman,

Harry Cassie as the CEO,

and a few people they brought with them

on an executive level as well.

So for the first few years, they were successful,

but it was hard not to be successful if you were a stable

enough business during that period of time

because there was a lot of money and cash

coming into the economy.

The Custom House Capital Investigation

was certainly one of the most complex investigations ever

undertaken by the Garda National Economic Crime Bureau.

I think ultimately, 100 people came forward

and actually made statements.

And then you have to involve every aspect of their investment

with that particular firm.

How it was handled, how it was organised,

and the messaging they received from Customs House

Capital and staff.

A lot of victims didn't come forward.

But in fraud investigations in particular, it's not unusual

for victims to not come forward.

Victims sometimes feel ashamed. They're embarrassed.

They don't want their business known.

It took 12 years from the point of when it officially stopped

for people to go to jail. INTERVIEWER: Why was that?

Because it took so long to unravel

the complexity of what they did.

There was so much data, electronic data,

retrieved as part

of that investigation on servers and on different computers,

and it requires a particular data processing that was not

available to GNE/CB at that time.

And for that reason, the case was put on hold pending

the receipt of that report.

It wasn't people of extreme wealth from a lot of the people we spoke

to throughout the investigation.

They'd lost a very modest amount of money that they thought they

could use for later in their life, and it was the absolute stress

that people were put under as a result of this.

We started contributing to pension in the mid '90s.

By 2006, the business was going really well here.

And of course, when you're self-employed and you

have any relationship with any insurance company of any kind,

they're always knocking on the door.

One day they knocked on the door and said,

you have some cash in your pension.

Why don't you buy a pension property?

Because Charlie McCreevy has changed the rules.

You can put any asset you want into your pension.

Why don't you do this?

I did get a pension off, in computer type in Merrion Square.

Pat, the boss, he put me onto the pension scheme.

He retired, so he was shutting it down.

49,200.

When I set up my own business back in the '80s,

it was fairly successful, fairly quickly.

Then eventually, we had been introduced to the idea

of selling up a personal pension, and that would have

led me to Canada life.

Over a number of decades, we had saved something

in the order of of 475,000.

And so Canada Life, who were our pension provider

at the time, appointed a trustee for this property that we were

buying, and the trustee they were appointed were

Custom House Capital.

We never knew who they were.

We never heard of them before.

They start building relationships

within the intermediary community,

the financial voice community, accountancy community,

the Canada Lifes of the world, and start bringing them to say,

Well, if you introduce a client to this, we'll pay you

a commission, a fee, whatever it's going to be,

and that'll be part of the portfolio that

you'll have with them. But they would still be the client

of the Canada Life agent at the time,

and it would have been a product they were investing.

So they wouldn't have been a Custom House Capital client,

per se, but parallel to that,

Custom House Capital were bringing their own clients

directly.

Joe came in and he told me that he had an investment that he

thought I might be interested in. He said, this one is really good.

I would recommend that you join.

He said, in fact, I'm in it myself. You know what I mean?

He says, now, lots of my friends have gotten involved in the SSIAs,

and I was too cautious to get involved.

The broker, he assured us that Custom House Capital

were the top people, and I was brought down, introduced to them.

It was all very impressive stuff.

Met John Mulholland in particular,

never met Harry Cassidy.

And that was it, really. There was nothing more to it.

You just signed this and we look after everything else.

AD: Custom House Capital Limited is regulated by the financial

regulator under Section 10 of the Investment

Intermediaries Act, 1995.

Authorised, regulated, central bank.

Why would you suspect that there was anything

untoward here at all?

So CHC's basic fundraising model for themselves as a corporate

entity was based primarily on a 5% upfront commission

on any money invested with them.

So if you invested 100,000, they would take 5,000 as commission.

That's a pretty aggressive, juicy commission.

But it allowed CHC then offer very extravagant junkets

and incentives to try to get money in.

And then on top of that,

they were getting commission on the

monies invested in the property.

WOMAN: They were good at bringing clients on board.

They recognised this within each other.

They both like to go off and play golf together.

And John had a place down in Mount Juliet.

It was the ultimate junket.

And it was part of the era at the time, that you had

to look after your clients.

There was games of golf, there was dinners,

there was nights out, there was social gatherings between

John Mulholland and his wife, and my mother and my father as

well, who obviously would listen intently to the advice that John

would give and trusted him implicitly on whatever he might

suggest they should do and what products they should

invest into as such.

The Custom House Capital Prime Property Fund

number 2 has just been launched.

What benefits exactly does that offer to investors?

As with the CHC Prime Property Fund, one, it offers investors

diversification and the same great range of benefits.

They love to have that image of, look at us, we're successful.

Suave.

Loved himself, loved the man about town image.

I remember my dad saying to me that they had bought this premise

on Merrion Square, this big Georgian double fronted

premise, high ceilings and antique furniture, and that

where was all this money obviously coming from.

Surely the fees weren't that good to obviously create that level of

investment in a business premise.

The high upfront fee couldn't have happened

without the expectation of very high investment returns,

and they couldn't have realistically been offered

at that time on anything other than property assets,

which had had a very long period of sustained buildups.

And in an environment where asset values are rising

by between 15 and 20 %.

My instinct is less to worry about the

size of the 5% commission than

to say, hurry up and get the money committed.

Don't leave me out of the race.

I think it would be safe to say between pre-retirement

and post-retirement, the value of the funds was

definitely over a million, at one point 1.2, 1.5 million.

But it fuels the bubble, and it reinforces the bubble,

and it reinforces the danger of the bubble, because now we've

got a bunch of investors who have used borrowings to get in here,

and if the asset value drops, the risk that they

have negative equity inflicted on them suddenly rises.

They started sending me updates from CHC, which, strange enough,

made me feel more secure.

Over two years, the years 2006, 2007, I put in what was

a high five-figure sum.

Here we are in 2025,

and I have never seen one cent of that money.

This is the first ever detailed breakdown of the Irish mortgage

market, and it shows a surprisingly strong

level of activity.

If you go to a party on a Saturday night,

the party starts at 10 o clock.

At one in the morning, you could justifiably wander around

the party handing out alcohol awareness leaflets,

but nobody's going to thank you for it.

And if you're in bubble lift-off mode,

people do not want to hear the warnings.

Germany's decentralised property market is booming.

Through our association with Berendes & Partners,

we identified the potential of the German commercial property

market over two years ago.

It was good marketing to say, We're not going to put all of our

eggs into the Irish property market basket.

We're going to spread them across Europe.

Just one kilometre from Hamburg City,

on Hyden Camps vague, our award- high specification office.

Before completion, a large number of renowned- Colorado.

What type of investors are you looking for?

Are you looking for individual investors?

And perhaps a range of pension funds.

It's open to all types of investments, private clients,

pension funds, approved retirement funds

and even company money.

The theory was they bought a building.

They used your funds as payment for the building.

They took a mortgage for the rest of it.

It was paid back over seven years.

And then technically, after the seven years,

they sold the building. And when our profit was made,

was distributed back through the pensions then, pro-rata.

It was 10.

680,000 when it was transferred as far as I'm aware.

Instead of sticking with what they knew

and which they had a good history with,

they decided, we can, I don't know, conquer the world

or whatever they were thinking. I don't know.

But like setting up the fund to buy a shopping centre

in Munich.

The pair of them, and there would have been a pair

of them in it, whole apartment blocks in Spain,

wanted bigger and better.

Statements were issued.

They'd come in the post.

Once a year, my dad would meet with John Mulholland.

It would be a semi-formal review.

Every couple of months, we would get a statement for each

person who was in the pension.

Everything is fine.

Don't worry about it. Your dad's investments are secure.

He had lots of high-profile established business people

that were obviously investing in CHC products.

So what's good for the goose is good for the gander

in some respect.

REPORTER: The jaw-dropping slide in Irish bank shares today is

unprecedented for recent times.

It was Warren Buffett who said that it's only when the tide goes

out that we get to see who's been swimming naked.

And the global property rise, that peaked 2007, 2008.

And because so many people had borrowed money to take part

in this, financial leverage worked against people

on the way down.

And that turned a lot of people into negative equity positions.

And then whoever had lent to them had to foreclose on them.

The fear is the cancer has spread to the heart of European banking.

Anybody with a bit of insider knowledge knew the writing was

on the wall, and taking clients' money

in at that stage would have been a problem.

He came and had this investment proposal,

and that's what the Destiny 119 Property Fund

was presented to us.

And he asked us if we were interested in using some of the

cash that was still in our pension.

They were looking for more money

than we were prepared to put in.

They wanted 50,000 from each of us,

myself and my husband, both.

So we got receipts from Canada Life for the 25,000

that was paid into this fund.

They were selling it, and everybody was told

something different.

I mean, one gentleman, he was told the minimum

for that fund was 350,000, and that's what he put into it.

Then there was a group of people, and they had a company pension,

and each of them individually put in money, but all of them thought

they were dealing with something that Canada Life

itself was guaranteeing and selling.

Other pension people who are in this game many years have told

me, we would never advise people of your age to move your

pension at that stage. You were too old.

Starting in '08 and onwards into '09 or '10 or '11,

CHC suppose a property diversification

expeditions to Italy, Germany, France, wherever.

They were now losing money, even though Harry Cassidy wish

to present to the outside world a picture everything is well.

And it must have been that which spurred him to take

money from healthy funds to prop up unhealthy funds.

Custom House Capital did not have the permission to move client

monies into different funds or different products without

their consent or instruction.

That's written instruction to do that.

Yes.

And spinning plates in the air and running from one plate

to the other to keep it spinning.

He may have thought at the time that the drop in property values

being experienced in '07 and '08 would reverse themselves.

And that he was doing his investors a favour by keeping

the show on the road.

I think there was one or two meetings I was definitely

at in the boardroom in the front of the building,

Overlooking Merrion Square.

We were going on what was printed on the reports in relation

to the true value that was obviously there.

He was effectively stealing.

The second problem we had was that the drop in property values

continued and further exposed the financial fraud that lay

at the heart of what he was doing.

What we have here is the original servers from Custom House Capital.

These servers were seized by Gardaí

in 2011 under a court order.

They contained, obviously, a huge amount of information

relevant to our investigation.

Because of the volume of data and the multiplicity

of the victims, that led to a decision that we

needed to look for external support

using a data analysis tool that was

not available to GNECB at that time.

And so the report that we got is around 2020 or 2021.

It can be quite daunting at the start when you look

at terabytes of information, you go,

My God, how are we going to make sense of this?

But you have to come up with a process as an investigation

team on what we're going to do, how we're going to catalog

evidence, how we're going to identify evidence.

Each individual member of the team reviewed a report,

and we had a meeting that went on for about three hours.

As we had the meeting, we would look at some

of the evidence that we had available, some of the data.

Custom House Capital used a system called Unity.

And what essentially was, it was a system that was a ledger

that they could keep track of where investors' money was.

We were also able to reconstruct the email server and we could see

what people were saying to each other in around the the time

that this was going on. The approach that was taken

at the beginning is that we look at one injured party,

look what happened to their money,

and treat that one transaction as a fraud or a theft.

But when we actually realised that there was simply going to be

too many transactions to do that in Custom House Capital,

it would have been thousands of transactions.

That's when the focus turned to the email traffic.

Who was speaking to who, and who was in charge,

and what role did each person play?

There was people involved that were doing certain things

that they probably shouldn't have been,

but they might not have been aware of the greater picture.

But certainly the heads of CHC

knew exactly what was going on, and

that was evident from the emails.

At the end of that meeting, we decided that we were going

to investigate it as a conspiracy

among the senior management rather

than individual deceptions of 73 individuals.

The whole focus of the case changed thereafter.

So before even we talk about how money was lost.

The foundations were quite shaken how they were managed as well,

because the regulation regime in 2007, when this all started

to happen, wasn't as strong as it is now.

But at that time, it was like the Wild West.

In the regulator's checks in 2007,

four years before this blew public,

four million of differences between what some accounts said

were in them and what was actually in them were identified.

It should have been absolutely glass clear to the auditors

that these records were in a mess.

My husband is a photographer, and he went to a lot of social events.

He photographed a lot of prize givings at various fancy

golf clubs and things like that.

He met one of the directors who subsequently was jailed,

and he knew that we had cash in our pension.

Now, Barry didn't know that we had cash in our pension, but this guy

knew that we had cash in our pension.

And then eventually, we were approached by somebody

acting on behalf of Custom House Capital through Canada Life.

They were desperate to get money in, and I don't think they were

able to get enough money from dealing with direct clients.

I suppose at the start

of the investigation, we have to figure out who's

involved, who's a suspect, who's a staff member.

So we have to get an overall picture of the inner workings

of Custom House Capital, but we could tell from the outset

that the main people involved appeared to be Harry Cassidy,

John White, John Mulholland, and Paul Lavery also held a key

role as the financial controller within the company.

When we look at the actual scheme of what was going on,

it was essentially where clients would be given valuation reports.

The Destiny Equity Fund had 32 million in it at one stage.

What these valuation reports would What we say to the client is

that this is how your money is performing,

this is where your funds are.

When CHC started to chase, they started cashing the equity

fund without the client's consent or knowledge,

moving this cash across here.

Every couple of months, we would get a statement for each

person who is in the pension.

I was getting an update from Canada Life,

which is the most peculiar thing.

So this Valovis bond here was moved out

into what's called a special

purpose vehicle, an SBV, and this could have been

for a property in Germany.

Their funds had to be removed from what we could see were

property funds in Europe.

The funds were then placed in the correct place where

the investor thought they should have been.

And once they had done that, they would run the valuation report.

Paul Lavery would calculate fictitious interest,

which would also be included on the valuation report

that went to the investor.

So the investor would get their valuation report and be happy

and confident that my money's performing well.

Then falsified assets because none of the money is where

it should have been in cash or in equities.

And the investor would obviously have absolutely no knowledge

of this whatsoever.

There's so many people involved in the company.

How do you hide something on this level?

How do you hide it?

And what we believe is that the pop-up system on

the internal CHC computer was the way the fraud was concealed.

So I'm just looking at one particular note here.

When you type the client's name in, it will say,

please contact Harry or Paul before issuing any valuations.

That raises our suspicion of surely

if an investor called CHC,

they can be advised of their account status without having

to go to the head of the company. There's a note on it.

Client should not be in QIF II to investment.

These need to be backed out to run a valuation as per PL.

Well, which we believe is Paul Lavery, and he will

calculate what interest is due.

As we were going through the email traffic, we can see

a reoccurring phrases, for want of a better word,

and one of them was the term needs to be backed out.

So we could search that term on the email servers

looking for backed out.

And what we did discover was

it was instructions being given to back

clients out so they could run reports to deceive the clients.

And once that was done, the money was returned.

But there was another example of an an email,

Can you do your magic on this account as the client is showing

an investment in property?

Client is showing an investment in property.

Why should a client be showing an investment in property unless

he's actually invested in property?

So I think that one email alone kinda nearly set the tone of what

was actually going on at the time and the scale of what

was going on at the time.

In 2009, the Central Bank sent

an inspector into CHC, and they also restricted CHC from

taking on new investment monies.

In the investment world, that's the equivalent of a yellow card.

Now, at that point in time,

with 1.1 billion of assets under management, with 320 properties,

with 40 funds, it was a complicated labyrinth

of a business already. But only 20 % of that business

was actually the regulated side.

So the central bank had no idea what was going on on

the unregulated side.

And there's paper trail saying, that's not our problem.

And then they found that monies had been taken from fund

A to prop up fund B.

So their solution was to try and sell that part of the business,

Custom House Capital, the regulated entity,

to Appian Asset Management at one stage.

That was a terrible solution.

Appian Asset Management, in good faith, took the leap

and did that in 2009, 2010.

Definitely around the time that Appian were looking at buying

into CHC, I think John probably spoke

to my dad in relation to, we're looking to sell

the business on or there's going to be a change in ownership on it.

It took one of the staff members actually just raise their hands

and say, there's an issue here.

Yeah, it was.

Angela Mahon, she took up a position

in Custom House Capital in 2007.

And she was promoted in 2008 to

Head of Finance and Operations.

So she was at a more senior level.

And she attended a meeting where there was a discussion

on a shortfall in an investment in property

in Germany, something around around 11 million.

She realised that they didn't have the money

to meet that shortfall.

And she learned that money was being taken from

clients' accounts.

She said that was wrong, and she contested that

with the senior managers.

Basically, she was overrun by the senior

management team, and she decided that she couldn't

put up with this, and she resigned her position.

She was asked by two of the senior managers not to resign.

One actually said, you're only a young person.

You have to realise there's a commercial reality,

sometimes, and when that commercial reality is there,

integrity goes out the window.

She left in late 2008, and in 2009, she actually had

to contact CHC to get her P45.

And in that conversation with a senior manager, she asked

had the situation been resolved?

And it had not.

And at that point, she made a disclosure to the

financial regulator.

And then she cooperated fully with the Garda investigation

in terms of, as a witness.

WOMAN: I was in the car, and I started reading it,

it possibly mentioned liquidation.

And I just messaged Harry immediately.

Just, what the fuck?

And he came back to all blown out of proportion,

nothing to be worried about whatsoever.

And we now know, of course, that was the top of the slope.

Custom House Capital were one of these companies that were

registered by the Pensions Board, and I invested my life savings,

which goes back nearly 40 years of contributions for my pension.

My mom is elderly, when she was in her 80s, she decided it might

be a good idea to sell her house.

My dad had died some years before. Say that, Pattie.

John, good afternoon.

How's the form, Joe?

Are you a victim of Custom House Capital?

Absolutely. Up to the walls.

But it was a huge scam from day one

because the financial statements

we used to get every six months were falsified.

The shareholders, people who ran the firm were very well known.

They were recognised in the industry.

John Mulholland, John White, Harry Catsby.

Custom House Capital got over one billion from investors.

It's more white-collar crime in this country.

The first anybody really knew if this was in July,

and at that point, there was a freeze,

and you could not take your money out.

The ship had sunk at that point.

I was due to retire about the end of December.

After that, I would have no funds whatsoever.

There's people who had every penny that they own

in terms of what they provided for their old age

in that fund, and it's gone. What about you, Patrick?

Have you told your friends?

No, I haven't. Why not?

It would be very embarrassing.

Well, I wouldn't be embarrassed about it.

Patrick, you say you stand to lose your house

at the end of the month. Well, I could.

We're sending people to jail for not taking a TV fee.

And all these people are walking about scotfree

after throwing away millions on people, their pensions,

their life schemes, people are going to lose their house.

Out in the street, in your bare feet.

Scamers, the country is so corrupt.

Joe Duffy.

I was sitting listening to Joe Duffy.

Once I established it was my investment, I kinda of...

knocked off Joe Duffy and got on the phone.

And basically, he just told me, there's no money in this for you.

You will get nothing back.

And he was quite blunt about it.

Well, shortly after John White told my aunt, sent her a cheque.

There was no indication right up to that minute.

But Christ, of all the people I know in life,

how hard this money was earned.

Every day, grinding away, getting up at all hours

in the morning, and to lose it all just like that.

The regulator was writing letters to Custom House Capital

long before we ever transferred our pensions to them.

Had we known that, we would have never done it,

but we didn't know.

There were so many people who didn't do their job properly,

coming back to Central Bank and not actually managing

the business, and the Pensions Authority,

did all these people fail at what they did?

There was an environment there that allowed these people to do

the things they were going to do.

So there was a number of arrests

carried out as part of the investigation.

Harry Cassidy, Paul Lavery, and John White were

arrested in 2012, initially.

But again, there was a second round of arrests

conducted in 2019,

and that was obviously done at a time when the investigation

team had built up a lot more knowledge

of what actually went on.

REPORTER: The Dublin district Court heard that

the three men were all arrested in Dublin earlier today

by the Garda National Economic Crime Bureau.

John Mulholland was arrested in 2019.

Paul Lavery was arrested again in 2019.

John White was also arrested again in 2019.

We had sought to arrest Harry Cassidy again in 2019,

but he wouldn't present to Gardaí voluntarily to be

arrested on the advice of his solicitor.

He was in Germany at the time.

I believe, possibly he was teaching English

as a foreign language.

The court heard John Mulholland, John White, and Paul Lavery

made no reply when charged.

He was ultimately arrested by the German police.

I believe he spent approximately about three months in custody

in Germany, but in the end, he decided to return back to this

jurisdiction where he was met and ultimately charged.

After it all collapsed with Custom House Capital

and the liquidators moved in, I used to receive

a letter every year.

The balance was zero.

I don't know the story of how

these properties ended up being sold

the way they were for as little as they were.

The buildings are still there.

The rent is still there.

So therefore, there's no reason why there should be a problem

with any of these things.

But of course, with the times, that were in it, they

become a fire sale.

Yeah, we got 550 euros each back.

That's it.

And for the regulated side,

where people had money in regulated

investments, there's a thing called

the Investor Compensation Fund.

The maximum that the Investor Compensation Fund

can pay out is 20,000 per investor.

And people may have had savings from an entire lifetime

that had to look after them in their old age,

parked in CHC, and to have that so sharply reduced

probably would unleash medical symptoms in some of them.

Her health was failing.

She'd been in hospital several times.

Now, my fear was we'd get the phone call

to say she's fallen, and that then I would get calls

to say we need money to pay for her nursing home.

Now, God forbid, had she ever rung me and said, Nick,

get on to Harry and tell him I need 10 grand or 20 grand.

I would have had to say to her, Helga, there is no 10 or 20 grand.

Now, how could you say that to somebody

who built their...

This was her life, the fear that the phone would

ring, because she was very unwell.

She was finally brought in the hospital during COVID,

and she died there alone, only the hospital staff.

We rang, but they said, there's no point in coming over.

And that's what frightened me most in the last year.

And thankfully, I didn't have to tell her.

I think it came to a stage where he wouldn't even

talk about it anymore because he knew he was...

Not much he could actually do about it.

His health was failing.

He'd lost his wife.

He was spending three days a week in hospital having dialysis.

So his life had become quite insular.

And with that then, I suppose everything began to just

cave in on top of him.

I got a letter first, and I got invited to a meeting in town.

There were people there, and they were seriously aggrieved.

I think there was one guy had something like 50,000,

and he was furious.

And I'm sitting there with the cold realisation

that nearly 400 grand

on my part had been put by this broker into Custom House Capital

on one bet.

Yes, which was a very awkward conversation.

And I had to explain to them as they were coming up

to retirement that their pensions were gone.

And in my opinion, they would I never see any of them.

At the end of the day, the book stopped with me.

I made the decision. It was my decision

as the trustee of the company.

It was the wrong decision.

It was my decision, and I had to own it.

I was assigned to cover the sentence hearing of the four men.

So the presiding Judge, Judge Orla Crowe, she was sitting

that day in courtroom 12.

I remember going up in the lift and walking in,

and it was just so busy.

There were so many people in that courtroom.

It was a very sad day, to be honest, because there were

widows where the husband had died since,

but all their money had gone

into a pension fund through Custom House Capital and lost everything.

It seemed to take an eternity to get from the back of the court

up to the box and then to have the accused

sitting right in front of you.

But the Judge, I thought, handled it very well.

And of course, the newspapers were all over it.

So there were 197 victim impact statements handed into the court,

and four of them were read out by

affected investors in Custom House Captial

or by family members of those investors

who had passed away.

I saw a woman cry.

She said, I put my pension fund in.

And she said, it means I'll have to go back to work at 65.

She was crying, but nobody put their arms around

her and said, it'll be all right.

It is only now that I approach retirement age

that the full impact of this theft is starting to manifest itself.

In the past, I pushed it to the back of my mind,

but for the last few years, I cannot shake it off.

It causes me many sleepless nights nowadays, and I constantly

worry about my financial future.

With the world the way it is now, I have two adult children

still living at home, and I maybe could have helped them

with a deposit on a house if this money had not been stolen.

I've lived my entire life in South Inner City, Dublin,

and in a broader sense, this crime has also compounded my

belief that there is a demonus in Irish society,

which robbed me and my family of a more secure retirement.

Having worked continuously for the last 45 years and never

relying on the state for a single cent, I don't think that this

was too much to aspire to.

Now, there were four guys being sentenced.

They all had their own legal counsel, separately.

Each of them stood up and advocated for why their guy

shouldn't go to prison.

It was all like cats in a sack, just all fighting,

trying to be the one who doesn't go to prison or doesn't

get the worst sentence.

And the way they were talking about these guys,

it was like they were paragons of virtue.

I turned around to Barry and said,

I'm going to start feeling sorry

for them soon if they keep on going on like this.

I said, are these guys talking about these men who have

defrauded all of these people?

So Harry Cassidy and John Mulholland took 2.3 million out,

discreetly out of company

in commissions directly to a Luxembourg bank account,

and a Tenerife property was bought for John Mulholland.

So they were profiting during this period of time

from 2007 to 2011, personally, as well

as drawing out salaries.

Sixty years of his life working, putting away money to support

himself in the allotted years of his life

that he was going to be able to enjoy.

Then to see it all, the majority of it all wiped away

was really frustrating for him.

And one of them was trying to say that he was so

much younger and all this kinda stuff,

and I was a bit led and all that.

And the judge was like, you're an adult.

Take responsibility.

The Judge noticed in her sentencing remarks that the men,

threw their guilty pleas, that meant that the state was saved

a very long and complex trial.

REPORTER: The judge Judge said 67-year-old Harry Cassidy,

the co-founder and Chief Executive Officer of CHC,

was in charge of the entire conspiracy and breached

all trust placed in him.

She sentenced him to seven years in jail.

53-year-old John White, the Head of Private Clients,

was given four years.

Paul Lavery, who is 47, was Head of Finance and carried out

directions he knew were wrong, the Judge said,

jailing him for three years.

73-year-old John Mulholland, a Co-Founder and a non-executive

director, pleaded guilty to neglectfully

discharging his duties as a director and was

jailed for 12 months.

Judge Crowe said many of the victims felt shame,

but that was misplaced.

She said they had been systematically deceived

in a sophisticated operation,

which went on for almost three years.

The most dramatic part of it, looking back now,

was when the guards came in to take them away to the cell.

A lesson there to the professions, that there is a price to be paid.

If they misappropriate people's funds.

I'm very happy that even when he does come out, he will

still be a convicted felon.

He's a criminal, and he will have done time.

Thankfully, we still have our health and we have

a vibrant family.

My wife still works, but I turned 74 this month.

It's difficult because we're reliant on the state pension

and then a few bits and pieces.

I suppose I took, and I still take,

a philosophical approach to it all.

There's no point in me getting angry about it.

I heard of people who borrowed money to put into that scheme,

and they're the people I really feel sorry for it.

You just move on.

I think Irish people, they don't like talking about

misgivings or they don't like talking about being taken for a

fool or being taken for granted.

So there'll be a lot of people, I think, that will just

take it to their grave.

And we brought her ashes up to Kilnadeema,

and she's buried beside her husband, with my godmother.

Lately, I've been starting to realise,

not that it went bad, it was criminal.

It was an offence. People have gone to jail for it.

Years after the collapse and the whole lot,

we actually worked in the building that they operated from,

in Merrion Square. And I walked up to the door,

there's, Custom House Capital looking at me.

They never took the plaque off the building at that stage.

I think it's sad that anybody would think that

they had done something wrong.

You're supposed to work hard

and you earn a few bob and you set

a few bob aside and you invest it somewhere

so that it's going to grow.

You will be able to provide for yourself,

and you won't be depending on the state,

and you won't be depending on your kids,

and you'll be able to afford all the things that you still

need to do when you're retired.

That's what we're supposed to be able to look forward to in this

green and pleasant land.

♪

SUBTITLES: RTÉ, 2026.