Chambers Travel Group’s Chris Thelen and Pam Bridger recount how the company’s fraudster finance chief, Alan Cooper, was caught. By Martin Ferguson
For four years Alan Cooper (pictured) cruised the streets in his BMW, Maserati or Porsche Cayenne. He spent £70,000 on designer watches such as Rolex and Gucci. His children enjoyed private schooling and luxury ski trips.
It wasn’t a bad lifestyle for a man earning £63,000 as the financial director of a business travel company. However, the bubble burst when the fraudster was arrested on January 31 last year for stealing £3.3 million from Chambers Travel Group.
Chief executive Chris Thelen appointed Cooper as finance director in 2008. The company was expanding quickly and needed to beef up its resources. Although Cooper’s tenure was intended to be temporary, the pace of growth meant he remained with the business until his contract was terminated in the summer of 2012.
By 2008 Chambers was turning over £90 million a year, and had established itself as one of the UK’s fastest-growing and most innovative business travel companies.
Thelen realised the world of travel management had reached a pivotal, post-credit-crunch moment. He was investing in mobile technology and creatively using data before many of his competitors. But for all the effort and growth, he felt demoralised each year when the final accounts were drawn up to reveal a net profit of only a couple of hundred thousand pounds.
He said: “I thought I wasn’t doing a very good job. I questioned my leadership skills and abilities as an entrepreneur. I started to ponder whether we were investing too much in technology, and if we were opening in too many new markets too soon.”
The reality, of course, was very different. Had Cooper’s hands not been in the till, the travel management company would have been clearing a substantial profit and Thelen would have felt vindicated. When Cooper was recently sentenced to five years in prison for fraud, it brought a disturbing chapter in Thelen’s career to an end.
Cooper’s scam was to transfer cash to business accounts that were under his control. Payment records were wiped from the accounting system, and no invoices or paperwork supported any of the transactions. It was almost impossible to find out where money was going.
It was shortly after the appointment of an experienced chief financial officer that Cooper’s scam unravelled.
Pam Bridger, who had previously worked for FCm Travel Solutions and Britannic Travel, had witnessed fraud in the past, but nothing of this magnitude. She joined Chambers in April 2012, and by August Cooper was gone.
“His incompetence made me feel uncomfortable,” she recalls.
“I had no way of knowing if he was perpetrating a fraud.
“A classic answer to a question about the finances would be ‘leave it with me and I’ll get back to you’.”
Bridger started combing the accounts, but it took another five weeks until she was sure a crime had been committed.
“The day I was certain was October 10,” she says. “I’d found discrepancies on the bank statement. No one knew what they were, so I went to seek clarification at the bank. It was the tip of the iceberg.”
The initial investigation focused on £655,000 that disappeared between October 2011 and August 2012. But it transpired that over four years Cooper had stolen £3,361,382.
Remarkably, Chambers continued to win major accounts and release new technology. By 2012 its turnover had increased to £115 million.
Bridger and Thelen have since introduced checks to prevent any such fraud happening again. “No matter how much you trust the senior team, you have to ensure no one has single signatory control,” says Bridger. “You must have logical and sensible controls.”