"The interest was incredible. I saw one guy dealing with three staff members filling out forms at the same time. There was huge pressure, " said 'Jack'. * A confidential internal report describes a handful of stressed-out sales and support staff rushing through orders worth tens of millions by the hour.

It stated that the "bulk of sales", worth 334m for one bond alone, were processed in just two to three days as the little bank was pressed to breaking point.

But even after witnessing the frenzy, Jack was still astonished at the final sales tally for 2004. The numbers were not just big, they were phenomenal.

A tiny bank in one of Europe's smallest countries managed to sell over 650m worth of tracker bonds in just over a year. That's around 1m for every employee.

Rumours of the scale of sales reverberated through financial circles.

" 50m, 75m or even 100m would be good sales for a tracker bond. This was incredible. Calls came in from everywhere. They wanted to know how we did it, " said Jack.

But the borrow-to-invest nature of the scheme sent up a red flag for other institutions. "When they did find out how we did it, they didn't call back, " Jack said.

ACC Bank did not follow up on its success the following year. Profits for 2005 slumped by more than half to 34m. The bank said the decline was down to the discontinuation of its moneyspinning product.

So why did ACC Bank miss out on so much money by not releasing another of its 'wonderbonds'? Was it because it had broken sales records by also breaking a centuries-old unwritten but golden rule of banking and investment?

Was it because it had persuaded customers to borrow money to 'invest' . . . to borrow well over half a billion euro in fact?

It's very tempting for banks to do this. They make money at both ends of the deal . . . they get a cut at the borrowing end and a much juicier cut at the investment end.

But what about customers?

Normally banks refrain from flogging loans for buy their own products because the numbers don't stack up from the customer's point of view.

It's risky and costly enough to invest without the added strain of paying off interest as well. At some point, they are going to get a lot of angry customers.

With some customers, that point has been reached already.

'Steve'* said he and a number of others known to him are "fairly pissed off" about having collective debts hanging over them of "well above" seven figures.

His own borrowings run to many hundreds of thousands.

And like other investors, he is "freaked" about having to pay tens of thousands in interest every year.

Rather than being comforted when he found out that a matching sum is on a deposit account with his name on it, he became even more alarmed.

"I thought I had invested in the stock market. When I found out that the money went into a deposit account, I can't see how it can generate the returns to justify borrowing all that money, " he said.

Steve is no longer so green; his equity investments made 20% last year. And did his Solid World Bond investment ride the equity wave too? Not quite to the same extent.

We tracked growth of Solid World 4 and 5. ACC Bank's website shows that they have turned in growth of just over 20%. But this is over three years and 18 months respectively for Solid World Bonds 4 and 5. That's not so great.

And, crucially, this figure does not include tax or interest. The fixed interest rate on one bond was 4.33% per annum. The variable rate is already above this level, after successive rises in interest rates, and is set to rise even more.

After those are totted up over three years and deducted, the gain is in the region of 5%.

"That's not much of a return from a booming stock market over three years, " he said. "It could have been a lot worse. We would all have been up the creek if the market hadn't turned in such a strong performance. ACC got lucky."

(ACC Bank itself puts 37% as the break-even point for borrow-to-invest bonds. Anything lower than that and the investor loses out. ) "The risk-return ratio on this deal still sucks, " said Steve, a successful businessman who knows how to turn a profit. "And what about the risks of things going sour?

This party could still end yet, " he said.

Steve claims he wasn't fully aware of what he was getting into. "A fairly green young fella (on ACC Bank staff) told me this was a no-brainer. And I obviously must have been fairly green at the time as I went for it. I didn't have much time for assessing such things."

ACC Bank executives we spoke to refer to great pressure on the bank's staff and internal systems during the sales frenzy of 2004.

Some expressed concern about whether all of the requirements on advice and sales practices were fully met during what must have been a period of extraordinary pressure.

ACC Bank insists that it adheres strictly to regulations on how staff advise customers.

"Intensive training is an ongoing feature to ensure products and services are delivered in line with best practice and to provide assurance that we are in compliance, " it said.

Nobody is suggesting that ACC Bank doesn't usually adopt the highest standards.

But did it let these slip during the selling frenzy of 2004 during a period of regulatory upheaval and extraordinary pressure on its staff and systems?

But aren't consumers also to blame for not questioning the deal more closely when the bank offered to lend them vast sums of money to buy its own product . . . and also for failing to distinguish credit from wealth?

By 2004, we had got used to borrowing to buy all the trappings of wealth: pricy cars, clothes and homes. But to be a real player in our capitalist wonderland, we needed one final accessory to chat about over a glass of Chablis in our favourite wine bar . . . a stake in the stock market.

That had always been out of reach because buying shares requires the actual possession of hard cash. And despite all of our supposed wealth, we don't actually have much of that . . . because it's all gobbled up paying off our loans.

When ACC Bank offered people credit lines of hundreds of thousands of euro each to become "global players" in the stock market, it tapped into the zeitgeist of Celtic Tiger culture.

So it's hardly surprising that the tiny bank was almost overwhelmed by the subsequent buying frenzy it had unwittingly unleashed.

*Real names have not been used. The Sunday Tribune spoke to several former executives and, for simplicity, combine their comments under the name of 'Jack'. Any similarity to any employee or former employee of ACC Bank is purely coincidental.

IS ACC GUILTY OF MIS-SELLING?

ACC BANK can certainly not be blamed for not spelling out the most relevant aspects of its borrow-to-invest tracker bonds.

They're almost all there in the brochures and sales paraphernalia.

Tracker bonds don't pay dividends and your money is tied up for "ve years and 11 months. It tells you that commission of around 4% is charged, though it omits to mention if there are hidden charges deducted by the designers of the product.

However, the information is very much skewed towards the sexier aspects of the deal, as you should expect with any marketing paraphernalia. The bulk of one brochure . . . eight pages . . . focuses on the upside of the product. It expounds at length about the stock market, using buzz words such as "global players" and mentioning "stocks", "equities" and "investment" many times. The overall impression is that anyone buying into this product will also be a "player".

Only on page 15 of the small print does it emerge that buyers are more savers than investors, whose entire funds go into "a "xed deposit account" with no withdrawals whatsoever permitted for the "ve-year-and-11-month term.

The interest is used to buy an option that gives a return based on the performance of the stock market. As usual in brochures, the smaller the print, the more signi"cant the information!

One "nancial adviser we spoke to did not like the way tracker bonds such as this are presented as stock market investments when they are more akin to deposits.

"They even send out information about stock splits, which are of no relevance because you are not buying shares, but do create the impression that you are player on the stock market.

You are not. You will not get such bene"ts as dividends, for example. It's a senseless product designed mainly to make commission."

He also takes issue with the way ACC Bank describes itself on the brochure as "a wholly-owned subsidiary of Rabobank, a triple-A rated bank". The clever placing of the comma creates the impression that ACC Bank is triple-A rated when in fact the rating applies to its parent company Rabobank.

He contends that ACC Bank could be accused of misselling, but that's a charge that could also be levelled at the whole market in his view when it comes to the marketing of tracker bonds.

And what exactly does mis-selling mean? Its a word that is very much misused. After all, isn't all selling a form of misselling, by its very nature? When someone sells something and pro"ts from the sale, they will always put a positive spin on it, highlighting the bene"ts and playing down the defects, just as anyone would when selling their car.

But that's alright as long as they don't tell any outright "bs and buyers know what to expect and are savvy enough to extract the relevant information.

Is the nub of this issue more about mis-buying? Many Irish consumers still naively expect a bank of"cial "ogging his own product to give them the full picture. And so they rushed to sign up in droves when a bank offered to lend them hundreds of thousands of euro to invest in its own complex "nancial instrument, which they didn't really understand.

They didn't read the small print and accepted glib assurances in brochures that their capital is "100% secure", without considering the potentially devastating impact of in"ation or interest.

And they didn't suss out the fees and charges that adorn any "nancial product, especially gimmicky new ones that haven't had a chance to be discredited yet. To paraphrase the late great economist, Kenneth Galbraith: Beware of innovation in "nancial services; it usually means the bank has cooked up a better deal for itself.

Nobody paid on commission should be expected to give you comprehensive and objective "nancial advice. If you want that you have to either work it all out for yourself, or go to a good, fee-based "nancial adviser.