Saturday was not a relaxing day off for top officials at the Canadian Imperial Bank of Commerce.

The executives, including CEO John S. Hunkin, were all in working.

They are trying to deal with the impact of a bizarre case in which faxes of documents containing highly sensitive financial information on some of its customers were sent to a West Virginia junkyard for the past three years.

When asked where the faxes are now, CTV reporter David Akin said: "Well, of course the best person to answer that question would be somebody from CIBC."

However, no one from the company has yet made an on-camera statement to CTV, he said.

Wade Peer, the junk yard operator, has the faxes in a locked filing cabinet.

"He's the only one who has a key. And if it makes you feel any better, Wade's Rottweiler, Captain Morgan, sits outside that office day and night," Akin said.

"He'd like to get rid of them. He wants to shred them. He said he doesn't feel comfortable with this information," he said of Peer. But Peer's in the middle of a lawsuit against CIBC and those documents could be evidence.

CIBC will be asking a U.S. judge on Monday to issue an order compelling Peer to take care of these documents, although that is already happening, he said.

Peer claimes he first started received them in July 2001. He claims to have received hundreds over the intervening years.

The man also said he alerted CIBC officials almost immediately, yet the problem has never been resolved.

CIBC's response

In an undated letter on its website, CIBC said: "As soon as we learned that some CIBC faxes had been misdirected to a U.S. company in the spring of 2002, we immediately took steps to safeguard our customers' personal information. We notified our branches that information was being faxed to an incorrect number. We also contacted the owner of the company who had been receiving the faxes and elicited from him a commitment to shred all the faxes he had received and to notify us should he receive any additional ones.

"We heard nothing further regarding this issue from the individual for more than two years and thus believed that the company was no longer receiving CIBC faxes in error.

"However, in the spring of 2004, the company filed a lawsuit against CIBC stating that they had received CIBC faxes through 2002. Then, late last month, the company informed us for the first time that it had been receiving faxes up to 2004. This news was a disturbing and surprising revelation, as we believed, and the company's lawsuit led us to believe, that the problem had been resolved two years previously."

Jennifer Stoddart, Canada's privacy commissioner, said this was "virtually unprecedented" in the private sector and launched an investigation to see if any federal privacy laws were violated.

Asked how this could happen, Akin said banks do their work these days through electronic transactions.

"These faxes were just backing up that transfer. The bank just needed a signature."

As a result, faxes would flow in from all around the country to CIBC's headquarters in Toronto. "The bank, being a big bureaucracy, perhaps some documents got mislaid," Akin said.

In the meantime, the bank announced Friday afternoon it was banning the use of fax machines for transmission of customer information.

With a report from CTV's David Akin, who can be reached at dakin@ctv.ca