TRANSCRIPT:
My name is Finn Jessen and I met Robert Dam at a printing company where I was employed.
I was the production manager at that printing company. And then I decided to leave the company for other reasons, so I spun off at one point and started something on my own.
We’d had the company for a couple of years, and my wife and I had built it up. And we were running at a good level where we could get by but we weren’t progressing because we weren’t salespeople. We weren’t good at that part. We were good at making things.
But Robert comes and introduces himself and says he would like to work with me because he’s a good salesperson. And I thought that sounded really good.
So we decided, actually quite quickly, to move to a new address, some slightly larger premises and get some bigger machines.
I was the one managing production and he mostly stayed in his office. So I did pretty much everything that needed to be done. I was there both evenings and weekends, putting in quite a lot of hours. The employees…well, they didn’t really have much confidence in him. I might have been a bit more blinded by him.
But sales didn’t really keep up as Robert had initially planned. So he sold me on the idea that we needed bigger machines. So we got bigger machines and we got bigger premises. The premises were so large that we actually had to rent some of it out to his wife so she could be a broker within the printing industry, which was also a good idea. But not much came from her side, and she never really reached any goals or paid rent for moving in.
Nothing really helped because Robert couldn’t sell. Unless he goes down and bids lower than the other printing companies, he’s actually not a very good salesman. He was good at selling himself. And that was all there was to it.
So we kept going for about a year, where he initially started off strong for a month and then it just began to decline, decline, decline.
I discovered that Robert had started moving invoices from Dam & Jessen over to Tina Dam’s company, which was called Grafikdam. And he did this by making double invoices. So he moved invoices from Dam & Jessen over to Tina Dam. And then Tina Dam could add 40% on top, so she got it much cheaper.
But I confronted him about it in front of the accountant. And the accountant said, “That won’t work. It’s illegal.” But he didn’t see anything wrong with it. He was okay with it, so he could get something out of it.
So at the end of 1999, it gets so serious that the accountant talks to Robert behind my back—and I didn’t know anything—and says, “We need to talk about this because things aren’t going well. “We owe a lot of money, and if this continues, you’re going to close soon.”
Then Robert starts negotiating with some companies. We first find a company that is actually very interested. It could have actually helped pay off our debts so we could have made it through okay.
Instead, he contacted someone named Kaj Lund who showed some interest in taking over our print shop. He already owned a print business. Later, we found out that Kaj Lund preferred buying a bankrupt business over taking over an active print shop.
But Robert continued negotiations with him. And I thought, “Well, at least we’ll move forward somehow.” However, it turned out I wasn’t involved in any of it. Robert was the one managing the negotiations. And in the end, the whole thing still led to bankruptcy.
And Kaj Lund actually goes in and buys the scraps for almost no money.
That’s what his interest was. And then he hires Robert as a senior manager in his company.
And yes, at that point, we had to face the consequences. When we found out, I looked my wife in the eyes and said, “Okay, what do we do now?” We talked for a long time about whether we could actually do this. And then we decided, okay, we can. So, we went in and took some machines out of the bankruptcy estate. I think we took on a debt of a little over [DKK] 1.5 million. Then we started up again afterward.
I’ve been self-employed for many years. The only time I’ve had problems was actually when I was with Robert. Both before and after that, I’ve been self-employed. I can proudly say that after the time with Robert, my wife and I started a new print shop, and it ran successfully for many years. At one point, we were able to pay off everything we owed and only make profits from the business. And that was a really big success for us. So we proved to ourselves that we could do it.
When I look back at the time and think about Robert, I thought we were friends. We shared the religion called Scientology and we believed we wouldn’t lie to each other. We trusted each other.
But that’s not how he is. He does what’s best for him. And when things started going wrong, he actually pulled money out of the company, or tried to. I noticed some of it, but what happened on the side, I really don’t know.
And that’s not what friends do. And I have to say, he really abused my trust there. So, he’s not my friend today.
