Mr. Shane Kavanagh:

How this all came about is that we were asked to engage in unethical practices. In other words, we were asked to dupe our customers, mislead them, and sell products. We would have known the risk appetite of much of our client base. Some people wanted their money to be safe and secure in a deposit account with a guaranteed return. We were asked to basically lure people into investment-type products, which many of them would not have been comfortable doing. When we said it was not in the customers' best interest to do this, we were essentially seen as troublemakers and we were told we were not team players. The issue was what to do: whether to do what the bank told us or to trick the customer. Our conscience got to us and we said we were not going to do that. By not doing that, the bank then decided it wanted us gone out the door.

During my time in the office I was put under enormous pressure to sell these products. I was also encouraged to tamper with the evidence; in other words, when I was filling out the documentation for customers I put in customer-centric wording which gave the impression that the customers pushed for the sale of the product rather than me pushing the product on them. If, down the road, the clients realised that they had bought a product they did not necessarily want to buy and that rather than their money being safe it was in an investment product, if they made a complaint to the Ombudsman and he looked up the paperwork and investigated it he would not be able to rule in favour of the client because it looked like the customer had pushed this product. In other words, I did-----