High-living truth stranger than fiction

GARY Mulgrew and his cronies were so proud of their lavish lifestyle that one of them wrote a fictionalised account called The Pursuit of Happiness - Overpaid, Oversexed and Over There. Mulgrew appears as Braveheart, the Scottish hero, while Giles Darby is Energizer Bunny - a reference to his limitless energy. Enron is disguised as Houston firm Hardon.

In fact, the real thing was as good as any book. Mulgrew and 30 of his colleagues were once flown by Enron to Chamonix in the French Alps for a skiing holiday. His employer Greenwich NatWest, now part of Royal Bank of Scotland, returned the favour by taking Enron executives to a lapdancing club in Houston.

One former employee said the bank's Houston office was almost entirely dedicated to Enron. The bankers spent lavishly, entertaining Enron executives. Not bad for a former bouncer from Glasgow. At one stage Mulgrew, 40, wined and dined Enron executives at the Carnegie Club, the exclusive retreat based at Peter de Savary's Skibo Castle in Sutherland.

Mulgrew and his team of bankers ran up huge bills during a stay last year while earning millions of pounds from Enron.

Mulgrew, who bought a lavish home in Halstead, Essex, in 1999, is a Celtic supporter and while with NatWest organised five-a-side football games.

Giles Darby was one of the star players in Nat West's finance department in the late Nineties, both on the pitch and in the office. A father of five daughters, he lives in a £1m home in Broxbourne, Herts, and now works with a small Wiltshire firm, Bonham Engineering. He refused to comment when news of the allegations broke.

David Bermingham lives in a £2m home in Goring-on-Thames in Oxfordshire and is understood to work in film finance. Former colleagues of Mulgrew, Darby and Bermingham say the trio invested personally in one of Enron's limited partnerships - a scheme that produced huge returns for some of Enron's own executives. From NatWest the trio moved to Royal Bank of Canada, taking with them a team of 30, but resigned when Enron went bankrupt, prompted, it is suggested, by RBC's embarrassment at their ties links to the fallen company.