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They faced down banks, hospitals and defence companies. Now they’re
oining forces
n a quiet spring evening in 1999, Eileen Chubb walked as casually as she could into the
office of Isard House, the care home for the elderly in Bromley, Kent where she had
been working for the past three years. Glancing over her shoulder, certain she was going to
be caught, she picked a ring-binder folder off a high shelf and emptied it of about 70 sheets of
medical records. She handed them to a fellow care worker, who climbed the rarely used back
stairs to a photocopier. The machine was so basic it took an excruciating 70 times of opening
and closing the lid to copy the evidence they both hoped would make their employeracknowledge the abuse of elderly and vulnerable patients in one of its units. The pair were
running out of time. Chubb, who had reported the abusers to social services two weeks
earlier, was aware that a manager was en route. Judging by the distance from the manager’s
home and the light evening traffic, Chubb knew they had at best 10 minutes.
“I was doing what I thought was right. At the time I didn’t even know what a whistleblower
was,” says Chubb. “I got pushed over a line when I saw the shouting and the pushing. We
told management and social services and no one made it stop,” she explains, adding that shefelt she had a duty to act. Failing to do so when she knew it was happening would make her
Rounding out their corner of the conference table is Gavin MacFadyen, director of the UK’s
Centre for Investigative Journalism. It was he who suggested to the whistleblowers that
they form a group at a seminar he ran last summer.
Beyond them sit about two dozen people whose lives, like those of Foxley and Gardiner, have
been transformed because they refused to look the other way. They have come together to
create a network to offer advice, legal counsel and psychological care to future whistleblowers, as well as campaign for their shared cause. The anger, hurt and frustration of
their debate makes evident that WBUK also serves as a support mechanism for its
participants.
Ian Foxley compared the very first meeting of the group, in March 2011, to “the site of a
plane crash where the survivors were just getting to grips with their own injuries and those
of their fellow passengers”. But today, the room is more like the ward of a hospital, full of
“doctors and patients”, as Foxley puts it. Which side you belong to is determined by how far
you have progressed along the arc of the life of a whistleblower.
Ian Taplin, the former Lloyds TSB bank executive, is still fighting for recognition of his
allegations against the bank. He is a “patient”, still at the beginning of the arc, wrapped up in
the injustice of his own case, angrily repeating his point as he leans over the table.
Diagonally across from him sits Martin Woods, whose detective work at US bank Wachovia
in 2006 eventually helped expose how Mexican drug cartels laundered millions of dollars
through the bank’s accounts.
Woods’ journey started with much the same emotion as Taplin’s. “I think everyone in this
room at one time thought about ending it all,” he says. After going to the press and the US
financial regulator, which eventually fined Wachovia, Woods’ situation improved.
Nevertheless, it took him another three years of being turned away by what seemed to him
to be the entire banking industry, before he found a similar job just days before this meeting.
He is one of the “doctors”, as are Foxley, Gardiner, Chubb and a handful of others. Also
among them are Kim Holt, the paediatrician who blew the whistle on the chaos and skeletalstaffing at the Haringey clinic where Baby Peter Connelly was examined (Baby P was given a
clean bill of health two days before dying of injuries inflicted by his mother and her
boyfriend); Margaret Haywood, who helped the BBC expose abusive care within the NHS
and was subsequently struck off the nursing register; and Vivienne Yarham, whose
allegations about unethical behaviour by two police officers ended her 25-year career in the
police force.
David Morgan, sitting diagonally opposite Foxley, is a consultant psychotherapist and
psychoanalyst who has agreed to help WBUK. He believes that many of us survive by
turning a blind eye to transgressions big and small – from the wrong person being promoted
for the wrong reasons, to banking executives who launder billions of dollars of drug money.
He is intrigued by the psychological burden of whistleblowing and by what society’s often
violent reaction to whistleblowers tells us about the health of the system.
“We survive and maintain our own security often by turning a blind eye. A whistleblower for
many reasons goes against the flow and does not turn a blind eye,” says Morgan.
Whistleblowers sometimes have no idea what they are getting themselves into, he adds,
especially regarding the psychological effects of the backlash.
Those whistleblowers who refuse to succumb to pressure when employers attack them with
accusations of ineptitude or mental instability; who get over their disbelief when police or
regulators fail to take up their cause; and who resist the temptation to make it all go away by
accepting settlements with gagging clauses, appear to have one thing in common. They say
the internal conflict they would unleash by looking the other way or capitulating, while still
believing in the truth of their case, would dwarf any punishment the outside world could
administer.
Nevertheless, the punishment can be brutal. Kim Holt, the paediatric consultant, was unableto return to her job for several years after raising her concerns in 2006. “My daughter was
being bullied at school. At the same time, she was seeing her mother being bullied to the
point where she is becoming ill,” she says. “But I think in a way I am quite cushioned, I have
a husband, I have money, I never lost my job and I have sort of been vindicated in the press.
Other people never get their careers back. They end up in poverty.”
Peter Gardiner was not as lucky as Holt. In 2004 he turned to the Serious Fraud Office
(SFO) after halting his travel agency’s work as a concierge for Saudi officials, whose expenses
were being funded by UK defence contractor BAE. Gardiner ended his lucrative contract
with BAE because his lawyers had advised him a new UK anti-terrorism law with an anti-
bribery clause meant he risked acting illegally by continuing. But after halting the contract
and “blowing the whistle” to the SFO, Gardiner went from having “the life of private jets and
cars” and a six-bedroom house in St Albans, to losing his home, his business, his art, his
pension and his family.
The SFO initially investigated Gardiner himself. “No one wants an individual who is being
investigated. I didn’t have any money any more ... ” His marriage broke up. “That was the worst,” he says, so softly that it is difficult to hear him. At around the time the SFO’s
investigation into BAE was quashed by then prime minister Tony Blair, citing national
interests, Gardiner was struggling to make ends meet. “I started doing cleaning jobs, I
worked cleaning churches,” he says, adding that he told himself at the time: “This is the real
world, this is what it is all about.” Vindication would take another four years, when the US
fined BAE $400m and found the company guilty of lying about its dealings, including those
with a Saudi prince.
David Morgan is neither surprised that so many people turn a blind eye to fraud and abuse,
nor that corporations and even those in authority fight back – often viciously – against those
trying to expose them. He likens the whistleblower to the child in the tale of “The Emperor’s
New Clothes”. “It is this kind of seeming authority, like the emperor’s, that blinds us from
seeing things as they really are, while also silencing those who see things differently. Fear of
ridicule and rejection are powerful disincentives,” says Morgan. “The whistleblower requires
guts. He takes a great risk challenging a human desire for certainties in an uncertain world,
and therefore has to endure being made to carry all the uncertainties him- or herself, before
truth is allowed to come to the fore or not.”
. . .
Within the whistleblower community, there is a lively debate about how Britain’s legislation
stacks up against that of the US. In the UK’s favour, its laws cover anyone, regardless of who
employs them, and offer a relatively uniform approach. In the US, employees can be treated
differently from state to state. In the opinion of many whistleblowers, however, the US is far
ahead of the UK because it encourages serious whistleblowers and the lawyers who
represent them. Not only is there a whistleblowing ombudsman, but the US’s varying and
sometimes overlapping regulators have also shown a greater willingness to pursue
companies for alleged wrongdoing.
One of the hottest topics among WBUK members is whether the group should lobby the UK
government to follow the US’s lead in granting whistleblowers a share of fines that are levied
with their help. The rewards can be substantial. In 2010 Cheryl Eckard, a former quality
control manager at GlaxoSmithKline, the British pharmaceuticals group, was awarded $96m
of a $750m criminal and civil settlement between US regulators and her former employer,
whose executives had ignored and then tried to cover up her warnings of contamination
problems at its drug factory in Puerto Rico.This week the US Internal Revenue Service
awarded former UBS banker Bradley Birkenfeld $104m for revealing a tax evasion scheme
that cost the US government billions of dollars.
Many of the City- and industry-based whistleblowers like the idea of such payments. They
reason that it would reward the whistleblower, help under-staffed regulators do their job and
generate greater interest in whistleblower cases from UK law firms, which today see little
upside. The doctors, nurses and carers are more reticent. “If you bring money into it, you
might end up with people saying they are whistleblowers when they are not. The biggest
reward for me would have been that we would have improved our service and prevented[the death of] Baby P,” says Holt, adding with irony: “Of course we would never have known
that we prevented it.”
But money already plays a big part in whistleblowing, given that the current legal path in the
UK usually leads through an employment tribunal where winning or compromising often
involves a financial settlement with a non-disclosure clause. Holt says she was first offered
£80,000, and, once the Baby P scandal hit, the reward for her silence was raised to
£120,000. After discussing it with her family, she turned down both. Almost all the
whistleblowers in the room were at some point offered money in return for keeping quiet.
But taking the money can come with serious drawbacks. Paul Moore, who as head of group
regulatory risk at Hbos says he warned its board that the company’s “sales culture was
significantly out of balance with their systems and controls”, accepted a settlement that
included a gagging clause. The decision was far from easy and the aftermath a long way from
comforting. “You have to factor in the emotional turmoil that makes it very difficult to
discern things in a balanced way. I felt schizophrenic in my soul,” he says, adding that he felt
like Judas when he decided to take the settlement after a lengthy battle to be heard.
“Everything was gagged. They even gag your wife! You simply cannot believe what state I
was in,” he says, describing how he slid women’s pads under his armpits to stop the profusesweating triggered by stress. “By that stage my drinking had got to the point [where] I could
drink a bottle of vodka in under two hours with no trouble at all. Imagine what that did to
my family and children. I felt suicidal. I felt useless.”
Eventually, Moore found strength in his faith and sobriety through Alcoholics Anonymous.
After watching Lehman Brothers collapse in 2008, he made the decision to break his silence.
By then it was too late to save Hbos, but, he says, it allowed him to use his experience to
inform the debate on how to avoid another banking crisis.
Moore says he initially settled on the advice of his lawyers, and because, after feeling
rebuffed by the Hbos board and ignored by the FSA, he thought his concerns would never be
taken seriously. He believes that had the odds not been so strongly stacked against him and
others in his position, more people would have come forward, possibly helping to avert the
financial crisis.
Every time a whistleblower is ignored or silenced, the odds of someone breaking away from
the group and speaking out are diminished, while the hand of those who seek to cover up
wrongdoing is strengthened. But the whistleblowers of the past decade are determined to
ensure the next generation is better protected by stronger laws and the support of those
who have gone before them.
“How do you think y ou are going to do that? What are the weapons?” asks Foxley, the
former lieutenant colonel. “You are in a war for hearts and minds and the soul of the country.
And the weapons you use are effectively going to be the media. You have to reassure y our
supporters, persuade the unpersuaded and deter the ones who would act against you.”
Success will come when blowing the whistle on even the most sensitive transgressions becomes less risky than covering them up.
Today the whistleblowers are still hashing out their message. Another major issue yet to be
resolved is where to find the money to allow WBUK to graduate from a place whistleblowers
can go for a sympathetic chat to one that changes laws. WBUK intends to be part of the
debate and some of its members have already been asked to submit evidence to the
Parliamentary Commission on Banking Standards.
The group also needs funding to help pay for whistleblowers’ legal and psychological support
– and perhaps even the odd mortgage bill. That may not be so easy, because unlike many
other charities, WBUK plans not to take donations from government organisations or
needs and then expensed BAE for the cost. Gardiner handed the
SFO many documents that suggested BAE could be bribing Saudi officials, but Tony Blair
quashed the investigation in 2006. Gardiner helped the US Department of Justice, which
eventually fined BAE $400m after finding it had lied about payments, including those made
in regards to Saudi Arabia.
Ian Foxley
‘In Britain there is still the idea of the whistleblower as the
school sneak – and you shouldn’t reward the school sneak you
should debag him’
In early 2011 Ian Foxley handed the Serious Fraud Office a huge
number of emails suggesting the defence contractor he worked
for had made questionable payments of at least £11.5m to
Cayman Island bank accounts and bestowed lavish gifts of cars upon Saudi generals. Thecompany, GPT Special Project Management, a subsidiary of pan-European EADS, is now
under criminal investigation by the SFO.
Kim Holt
‘I have sort of been vindicated. Others never get their careers
back.’
In 2006 Kim Holt and three other paediatric consultants warned
Great Ormond Street Hospital that chaos and skeletal staffing at
its Haringey clinic presented a “very high risk” to patients. Holt
says she was bullied and blocked from returning to work after
sick leave. When Baby Peter Connelly died just over a year later, the blame seemed to be
laid disproportionately on the Haringey locum who examined him, so Holt went to the media.
In 2011 Whittington Hospital NHS Trust took over Haringey Children’s Services, and this
year Holt was able to return to work, though at a different clinic.
Paul Moore
‘I am convinced that we are going to change the legislation and
make a better world’
As head of group regulatory risk at Hbos, Paul Moore says he
warned the bank’s board and the Financial Services Authority in
2004 that his employer’s sales culture was out of balance with its
systems and controls. Moore was fired and won a settlement witha gagging clause after he took his employer to court. He broke his silence in 2008, hoping his
story would help inform the debate on how to avoid another financial crisis. Hbos,
meanwhile, went to the brink of collapse. “I am absolutely convinced that, not only are we