Sex, drink and women: the novel approach to banking that so inspired a colleague

Robert Kelsey worked with the NatWest employees and wrote a book about their exploits in the United States

I knew the NatWest trio and I knew them well. And I don't think those three are crooks. Why do I think that, given the evidence? It's all in what we did as a department and how little understood it was by the outside world.

Structured finance is the creative end of the City. We're the mechanics under the bonnet. In my book I describe our transactions as looking like a map of the Tube. By the end of explaining it to a client they are so confused they don't know whether to repay a loan or change to the Piccadilly Line ­ such is the complexity.

We'd peek through corporate balance sheets and unravel the risks. Price risks on core commodities, interest-rate risk on loans, payment risk from creditors. Together they could make any balance sheet look unwieldy and frighten most raters and analysts. But, picked apart and repackaged, they became good investments for the people who understood those risks.

That's what we did. It was creative but it wasn't crooked.

Yet couldn't Mulgrew, Darby and Bermingham have been rotten apples in the structured finance battle? I'll have to see the evidence, but I doubt it.

Mulgrew was the visionary for what became one of the UK's most innovative investment banking divisions. He kicked out the go-home-at-five gang and turned us into a forward-thinking department.

But Mulgrew was a strategist, and he needed a doer ­ a hatchet man. Darby was that guy. Mulgrew would see we'd need to get through a door and Darby would find a truck and rev hard. Yet just as the door was about to be flattened Bermingham would say, hold on, I can pick the lock.

And of course, Enron lapped it up. The energy corp had a problem and the trio had the answers. At first.

Enron's bigger problem was its capacity for our answers. Our structured deals to reduce their risk and loan obligations were a drop in Enron's ocean. They came back for more and more. And for a while NatWest provided it, by hook or crook.

The relationship with Enron was run from Houston, not London. The main role for our Houston office was to run the relationships with the big energy companies. This meant schmoozing the directors and making sure they got what they wanted ­ usually golf, dinner and a strip club.

Of course we obliged. What went on? Lots and lots. Sure, if loads of British lads get together with some good ol' boys it's bound to get messy and faces go red in the morning.

Yet these are married men with families. They are state-school casuals, doing great while chums at home are plumbers. I guess they were on £150K basic with a bonus of half a million. Why blow it?

Sure go to strip bars, play with the expense account. And yes, look hard at that balance sheet and be creative within the law. But knowingly take it so far you'd risk a Texan jail term? I doubt it.

Extract from 'The Pursuit of Happiness'

"Braveheart, obviously Scottish, was the global head of the department. He was raised in a Glasgow orphanage and started his professional life as a nightclub bouncer, with the razor scars on his forearms to prove it. He also retained that hard bastard edge that worked as well in an investment bank as it did outside Bonker's nightclub.

"The third of my four bosses was Energiser Bunny. His physique suited his temperament. He was small man who looked like a cute character out of Wind in the Willows. Despite this, he was very successful with women.

"In this world inflated egos are vital. They're needed to carve out empires and go hunting for more. And my aim was to manipulate these egos ...

"Sex isn't something that springs to mind when thinking about banking ... That's unless you are an investment banker. Investment bankers get turned on by investment banking ... to the point where a marketing meeting for the third quarter can sound like a gang of sexual deviants."

Copyright Robert Kelsey,The Pursuit of Happiness ­ Overpaid, Oversexed and Over There