WHEN ACC Rabobank lost the title deeds to his building development, Jerry Beades launched into a campaign of retribution with unusual vigour. The north Dublin builder, whose chums include Bertie Ahern, staged a one-man picket outside Rabobank's Dutch headquarters; founded an organisation for dissatisfied ACC customers; bombarded the Financial Regulator with complaints about the bank; and appeared before a Dail committee calling for the Regulator's head long before such demands were fashionable.

There was reason behind Mr Beades' sometimes zealous crusade, which finally ended in the High Court last week with ACC ordered to pay Mr Beades €4.76m in damages.

But there was more to the case than vanishing paperwork. Mr Beades claimed the bank overcharged him by €300,000: ACC denied it but later gave him back the money. Internal bank emails noted that the "overstatement" of interest and fees would not be "visible" to the customer on his bank statement. Throw in the farce of the missing documents and the bank's acute sensitivity to bad publicity and you get a heart-warming tale of how a bank tussled with one of its more pugnacious customers and lost.

With banks facing unprecedented scrutiny after years of reckless lending under the indulgent gaze of a benign regulator, the curious tale of Mr Beades, the bank and his missing deeds strikes a timely chord.

The saga began in 2000, when Mr Beades and his business partner, Niall Ring, sought a loan of €2.9m from ACC to buy a development site at Richmond Road in Dublin's north inner city. Mr Beades's various property-related businesses grew from modest beginnings, buying and renovating properties on the north side of Dublin. He was part of the Fianna Fail crew in Drumcondra who lined out at each election for Bertie Ahern, the former Taoiseach. His efforts for the party got him elected to the Fianna Fail national executive. Mr Ring was cut from similar cloth; a former Fianna Fail councillor he was Bertie Ahern's appointee to the board of the IDA. Their company was called Fairlee Properties.

The problems arose in March 2003 when Fairlee fell into arrears with its repayments. There was a dispute over when the loan should be repaid and relations became acrimonious. ACC refused to lend any more money and threatened to call in the receivers.

Desperate, Mr Beades eventually got more finance from Bank of Scotland Ireland (BoSI). The bank agreed to lend him enough to pay off ACC and to continue developing his site. The deal suited everyone. But it was only in June 2004, when BoSI requested the title deeds to the Richmond Road properties -- which were held as security by ACC -- that it was discovered they were missing.

On June 22, Padraig Kiernan, the head of ACC's business unit, spelt out in an email the acute embarrassment this turn of events had caused.

"You can imagine that this is a very embarrassing matter for the bank, after having 'screamed' at the client to refinance us and having given an absolute deadline for the appointment of a receiver, we are not now in a position to facilitate the refinance. At this point, we don't know when we will be able to facilitate and we are certainly left with egg on our faces," he wrote to a colleague. Acknowledging the embarrassment, his colleague emailed back how, in the past, "scant regard was given to the importance of maintaining title documents as documents were strewn all over the strong room".

The dispute between Mr Beades and the bank escalated. In fairness to ACC, the bank tried to reconstitute the title deeds, a slow process that was still not completed two years later. ACC had also provided limited indemnity to

Bank of Scotland, allowing it to release some finance to the builder. In the meantime, Mr Beades could neither sell his site nor get sufficient funds to develop it. He had to sell three other properties below market value to address his cashflow difficulties. Eventually, ACC made an offer of €1m in funding but that was not enough for Mr Beades. In April 2006 he traipsed off to the Netherlands in a blaze of publicity to picket the headquarters of Rabobank, which had taken over ACC in 2002.

Mr Beades's picket certainly focused minds. Rabobank agreed to give him an interest-free loan of €3m. And days later, on the afternoon of April 18, the missing title deeds to his properties mysteriously re-appeared. They were found in a strong room that had been thoroughly searched before, clearly visible in a box perched on top of a safe. This small miracle attracted yet more publicity.

Rabobank's head office was not impressed. "ACC reports a strange incident surrounding the disappearance and re-appearance of deeds of ownership belonging to several of their clients ... There has also been press publicity and everybody working within the ACC bank, at least at head office level, is aware or should be aware of the problems surrounding these documents ... It is not known who returned these documents or why they were taken in the first place," a memo from Mark Rodgers, head of its crisis management unit, stated.

Rabobank dispatched a high-powered team to Dublin to investigate. The investigators produced a thorough report -- entitled "The re-appearance of the missing documents" -- but failed to solve the mystery.

"There could be a number of reasons for returning them (the deeds), however, the most logical explanation is that they were lost and found and that somebody panicked, knowing that the stakes were high and returned them so that they could be found," the report concluded, adding: "We cannot rule out administrative disorganisation for playing a role in the situation ... "

It turned out that the missing deeds of Mr Beades were not an isolated incident. Colm Darling, who was then ACC's chief executive, wrote an internal memo in May 2006 on foot of the report.

Forty-six title deeds had gone missing since January 2004, he wrote. Most had been found or replaced. "There are a total of 17 cases where missing title documents are still outstanding. The remaining cases have either been found or replaced and the cases closed with the customers and their solicitors. Regarding the 17 cases currently outstanding, no negative PR is anticipated at this point in time and the relationship with the client and/or solicitor is being actively managed ... (by the loan management unit)."

The memo outlined how cases of missing title deeds were usually dealt with quickly, by paying for the replacement deeds, which could usually be done in two months. Mr Darling noted that "industry feedback would indicate that the level of missing title documents within ACC Bank, while not acceptable, is within industry norms".

ACC Bank was clearly getting a run for its money from Mr Beades. One staff member wrote: "The reason why we did not come to an amicable solution is because of the belligerence and unreasonableness of Jerry Beades and his refusal for quite a long time to advise the bank clearly what he wanted."

That may have been the bank's view. Soon Mr Beades had grounds for more concerns: he claimed that he had been grossly overcharged in terms of fees and interest, a fact which the bank denied. However, the bank's own internal emails noted that loan accruals and surcharges had been "overstated".

An email dated December 13 found that current "loan accruals" were overstated by €120,000 and the current surcharge accruals overstated by €125,000. Nor was the customer likely to spot it: "The customer will have no visibility of the overstated accruals from a loan statement," the email said.

Eventually, ACC sued Mr Beades for repayment of the €6.27m loan. He counter-sued the bank for €30m in damages for the financial disarray caused by losing the title deeds to his development. ACC was ordered to pay the builder €4.76m in damages: and far from walking away with millions, Mr Beades has to repay the remaining €2m of the loan. (Niall Ring, Mr Beades's partner, had settled separately with ACC).

A ruling last week found that if the title deeds weren't lost, Mr Beades's company could have finished and sold the development in 2007 for €18.4m. Now it is worth €14m.

In a statement this weekend, ACC said it "has a rigorous tracking process in place to ensure that title deeds are processed correctly while held by the bank".

It also has "a robust process for informing customers if any overcharging on their accounts occurs, once it is identified, and it refunds customers in full. The bank keeps the Financial Regulator informed of any errors that might arise.".