Synnott shattered lives and dreams of dignity

MAUREEN Hargadon's husband was already suffering from Alzheimer's disease in June 1991 when Mark Synnott suddenly pulled the shutters on his clients.

By the autumn of that year her husband's illness had reached a point where he needed 24 hour supervision. He took to wandering, naked, away from the house when he fell down, Maureen struggled, alone, to lift him back on his feet.

It was then that the brutal truth about her situation asserted itself. She realised that a nursing home was out of the question there was no money. Mark Synnott's activities had seen to that.

In those cold days of shock and fear, Maureen Hargadon held onto her sanity through meditation and by confiding her thoughts to a journal.

"Mark Synnott has actually cheated me of my life (my lifestyle). I have had to go and get a medical card, dental benefit and all those things I am not accustomed to doing and having worked so I would not be dependent on the State for anything.

"I am full of despair and fear ... I find it hard to motivate myself. In the morning when I wake up ... (just) another day.

Judging from those extracts, Maureen Hargadon sounds like a victim, too weak, too lacking in resources, to handle the consequences. Nothing could be farther from the truth.

When her first husband died in the early 1960s, shortly after they had lost a son, she was left with seven children, the youngest still a toddler. She had no money then either. But she bought a guest house entirely on borrowed money and ran it for eight years without a holiday.

When the Troubles affected business, she ran it as a home for elderly people. When an accident left her on crutches, she sold up and bought a house divided into flats. Thus, she reared and educated her seven children.

In the end she had £100,000 from the sale of the flats, security for her old age that she had created by taking risks, tough decisions and grindingly hard work.

It had taken her 30 years to accumulate it took Mark Synnott just a few months to fritter it all away.

Now in her seventies, she is still a tall, handsome woman with a strong presence, not particularly happy like the vast majority of Synnott's victims to see her name or story in a newspaper but willing to do it to make a point.

And the point is that Mark Synnott's clients were not just a bunch of middle class idlers with more money than sense. The vast majority were people with small businesses who had worked hard all their lives, and relied on this money to keep them in their old age.

Many were elderly, some of them widows. A few were orphans, some had disabilities. Many of them were related in some way.

There were three first cousins involved for example there were parents and children, two and three siblings, many of them having been introduced by family members who had done insurance business with Synnott senior over as much as 20 years without complaint.

Synnott senior told them that his son was a wizard with money. Synnott junior in turn talked of investments in blue chip companies such as Norwich Union, New Ireland, Friends Provident.

Father and son carried on business from a fine, old detached house with an imposing forecourt in Ballsbridge, opposite AIB headquarters. There were no chandeliers or rare antiques, just simple, solid boardroom furniture, and nothing more ritzy than coffee on offer.

Even the infamous stud farm in Kill for which client funds were used was no more than a few rows of loose boxes containing a few horses, a small bungalow and some land. It was not Coolmore.

Where did it all go wrong? To outsiders, Mark Synnott's clients eight have seemed like people who were throwing money at a dream, a fantasy world where the by high returns promised by their investment broker would be routine. But this was not the case either.

Maureen Hargadon was nobody's fool. She was nervous about risk and told Mark Synnott emphatically that she would be very happy with a 10 per cent return.

But in a letter written just six months before his company's collapse, the man who had knowingly been running an insolvent business for 10 years, and who had long ceased to make investments of any kind, wrote "I am the process of placing your monies and I am confident that the necessary bonuses will be in the order of 15 per cent and not 10 per cent as discussed."

Mrs Margaret Irvine, widowed when her youngest child was only seven was dependent on her husbands' £48,000 legacy. The had no pension of and kind, then or now.

But although Synnott talked repeatedly of returns as high as 20 per cent, she brought her money to him only because he guaranteed 11 per cent. That would have been enough.

In the end, she lost it all.

In all the official liquidator Desmond Guilfoyle, through hundreds of hours of painstaking search and analysis, traced the funds of 109 clients whose money had been fraudulently dissipated by Mark Synnott. Though Synnott managed to lose £2.3 million of investors funds, there was nothing clever about his activities.

It was a crude, low level scam in which he took in investors' money, lodged it in his own or the company's account, and used it to, underpin his personal expenses and the company's running costs.

When a client screamed loud enough, he simply withdrew a wodge of it and sent it to the screaming client in the guise of a dividend.

It was a rolling snowball of loss with an inevitable day of reckoning.

He was clever only insofar as he managed to convey an image of honesty and stability and could spin a story in plausibly complex financial jargon.

Maureen Hargadon wrote in her journal "He wore a mask of sincerity and trustworthiness and was in no way a flashy person. If he was an older man, you could describe him as fatherly (he was 44 at the time). He would have struck you as a caring person, talking about his family and altogether being very disarming."

She asked him whether the company was bonded or insured. "He told me they were. I slipped up in not asking for proof of this ... but I fully trusted him."

In any event, however foolish and gullible some of Synnott's clients might feel, it appears that throughout the 1980s and even into the 90s, the two commercial banks involved were equally happy to rely on Synnott senior's previous good record.

As National Irish Bank, for example, allowed Synnott junior to run up an unauthorised overdraft to the tune of £124,951 as at April 10th, 1991 (two months before the collapse), it might be argued that the bank failed to take the opportunity to examine the Synnott accounts.

If it had, it would have been clear that its client was insolvent and had been since 1980, according to audits by the then accountants, O'Connor Leddy Holmes, who resigned as Synnott's auditors in 1988.

The bank seemed to emerge unscathed from what is an undisputed tragedy for so many vulnerable people, several of whom have considered suicide.

For NIB, a substantial injection of investors' funds into Synnott's account in the weeks leading up to the collapse reversed an unhappy situation for the bank. As a result it was able to close the account, which was now in credit.

Unhappily for NIB, one of these transactions involving a deposit of over £100,000 is the subject of two separate High Court actions being taken against the bank, probably to be heard before the summer.

One has been instituted in the name of Ms Dorothy Lynch, one of the last of the significant investors to deal with Mark Synnott before the collapse. The other is in the name of the official liquidator, Desmond Guilfoyle, who is making a claim of fraudulent preference under the Companies Acts.

Meanwhile, the week has been a bitter mix for Synnott's former clients. On the one hand, they have had the emotional satisfaction of seeing him get a jail sentence. On the other, it has brought down the final curtain on any outstanding hopes they might have harboured that out there, somewhere, lay a crock of gold, secreted by Synnott, only waiting to be uncovered.

Maureen Hargardon continues to believe that because Synnott continued to trade insolvently for so long, the various enforcement agencies and others failed in their duty and that there must be recourse in law.

She is seeking a solicitor "brave and fearless enough" to take such a case on a contingency basis.

Many of the people involved are now totally dependent on their children and/or social welfare for food and shelter. Maureen Hargadon's husband has since died and she has grown accustomed to taking money and other assistance from her two brothers and sister, and her children and their spouses, to whom she is touchingly grateful.

Margaret Irvine took two part time jobs after the collapse and has since at 58 been able to find a full time job. While her peers enjoy good golfing weather or set off for the bowling green, she expects to be working full time for at least another 10 years.