The allegation that a US intelligence-gathering firm had bribed an employee of KPMG Advisory Services, the company hired by the Bermuda Finance Ministry to carry out an inspection of the IPOC Fund, provided an intriguing sideshow to the long-running saga.

Nine months after KPMG began its probe, it lodged a civil action against Washington-based Diligence LLC accusing the firm of bribing at least one KPMG staff member in Bermuda to disclose confidential information related to the investigation.

In its civil suit filed with the US District Court for the District of Columbia in November 2005, KPMG said Diligence was retained by "a business competitor and litigation adversary of IPOC to gather damaging information about IPOC in order to "discredit and embarrass IPOC in pending litigation proceedings" and to "influence the outcome of the IPOC investigation".

In the complaint, KPMG sought $1 million in compensatory damages and $10 million in punitive damages, alleging fraud, conversion/misappropriation, and unjust enrichment. However, by June 2006, KPMG agreed to dismiss its complaint against Diligence.

That wasn't the end of it, however, as more information emerged about the case, in a story last year in Business Week. The storyline would not have been out of place in a James Bond novel. Documents relating to transactions by IPOC were said to have been placed in a plastic container beneath a rock where an agent could collect them without attracting attention. On another occasion it was alleged more secret documents were placed in the storage compartment of a moped near Elbow Beach to be gathered by the agent.

Spies were said to be positioned around Hamilton city centre to check that a British expat allegedly providing the confidential material was not himself an agent or was being followed by another agency. A fake agent, who called herself "Liz from Langley" (the Central Intelligence Agency headquarters are in Langley) also emerged from court documents.

Then there was the allegation that the computer system of the Bermuda law firm Wakefield Quin had been breached by another company seeking information related to the IPOC case. On hearing the claim, Wakefield Quin, one of several local companies to have worked for IPOC, mounted an investigation and found no evidence to suggest their IT security had been breached.

The claim emerged in a secretly-filmed video tape that was admitted into evidence in a civil case. Jeffrey Galmond, the Danish lawyer who purported to be the beneficial owner of the IPOC Fund, made the allegation in the course of a conversation with a former business associate, James Hatt.

"You know Kroll broke into the e-mail system of Wakefield Quin," Mr. Galmond told Mr. Hatt. "They are very good, I must hand it to them, they are very good, right?" The conversation took place at the Ritz Hotel in London on September 6, 2004, and Mr. Hatt filmed it without the knowledge of Mr. Galmond. At the time of the story, which was broken by the Mid-Ocean News in April 2006, Kroll did not comment.