There was an air of intrigue as dozens of business people arrived at the Comis Hotel, Mount Murray, for a gathering about proactive and covert financial investigations.

Robert Kinrade, director of Expol, added to the cloak and dagger atmosphere when he warned the breakfast visitors to deter from taking pictures or recording the proceedings.

The event was organised jointly by island based Expol and the Finance Isle of Man executive agency, part of the Department for Enterprise.

Mr Kinrade was on stage with Geneva-based Steve Young, chief executive of the Association of Corporate Investigators, and former police officer Dave Wilkins, an expert in covert operations.

Much of the meeting was taken up with a gripping re-enactment of a real-life case in which Mr Wilkins was sent in to work at a bank as an undercover agent.

Millions of euros had gone missing in a payment processing department and it was Mr Wilkins’ job to find out who was behind the dirty deeds.

The investigation was a success but only after a hitch when one of Mr Wilkins’ new female work ’colleagues’ tried to form a relationship with him. He made his excuses and spurned her advances.

Mr Wilkins, who could not be photographed because of the nature of his hush-hush job, has operated in many foreign jurisdictions working with law enforcement, governments and corporates utilising conventional and covert methods of investigation.

Mr Young, whose previous jobs included probing economic crime in as City of London police officer, told Business News that he welcomed the chance to address the audience of more than 100 people from the business world.

He said proactive investigations into corporate crime were an important tool in the battle to solve a whole range of problems.

He said it was good that they could use a case study as part of their presentation.

Mr Young said it was important businesses did no let their awareness drop.

’One of the benefits of coming to events like this is that it keeps awareness of the problem high. It’s not that we want to create mass hysteria. But events like this are priceless.’

He said that despite the growing use of technology and the cyber world, at the end of the day things boiled down to human beings.

He said there were various reasons why people ’flip over to the dark side’ to commit corporate crime.

He said: ’Wrong doing and breaches of the criminal law, they are not done by machines, they are done by people.

’Ultimately the start point is the bad intention of a human being.’

In fraud cases, he said that of the human drivers for doing wrong - ’clearly top of the list is going to be greed. They want more, they have missed a pay rise, they missed on promotion, and they decide to do something wrong.

’We should not ignore there are other drivers of wrong doing.

’In my career I’ve seen it all and even now I still get surprised.

’I’ve seen guys stealing money to, quite frankly, keep up an affair, where they cannot put the money through the domestic finances, to keep it from the wife.’

He told of a case of ’expense trickery’ by an employee who wanted to ’ring fence’ some money to fund his extra-marital activities.

He said other drivers for wrong doing included drug taking.

And he said another big driver, which is often overlooked, is gambling.

He said there were cases of employees who had been hooked on gambling and needed to finance their habit.

Mr Young said essentially most people are ’genuinely good’ and it was only a very small number that got involved in wrongdoing.

Mr Young said people had been lured over to the ’dark side’ for many years.

Back in his days with the City of London police there were people who hung around the wine bars where they would befriend girls from the banks.

’We called them gigolos. They were smart guys, flush with money, but we know their sole objective was to try and befriend girls who worked in banking processes that they could then corrupt and work for them.’

’And it has worked the other way too with guys seduced by good looking girls with dark intent.

’It is what we call in the business, ’’ cultivation’’.’