The war on terror will be concluded, George W. Bush has suggested, when citizens of the free world no longer live in fear. Everyone, that is, except Britons accused of crimes in America. Last week, three former investment bankers with the NatWest, David Bermingham, Gary Mulgrew and Giles Darby, took the extraordinary step, via a judicial review in the High Court, of asking the Serious Fraud Office (SFO) to investigate them. They did this because an investigation by the SFO presents the only means by which they can defend themselves before being extradited to the United States on charges of defrauding their former employer of $7 million. Never mind that the alleged offences were committed on British soil against a British bank, the British legal system has entirely washed its hands of their case. A district judge at Bow Street Magistrates’ Court has simply ruled that under the 2003 Extradition Act the men should be sent to be tried in Texas, without any evidence of their guilt being offered by the Americans.
The case of the Bermingham Three, as the accused have perhaps inevitably been dubbed, is guaranteed to elicit little interest among the British public. The men are bankers, after all; not a group with whom ordinary people are generally moved to sympathise. What’s more, their case is loosely connected with the scandal of Enron: the failed US energy company which has become a byword for the corporate excesses of the late 1990s. The accused, alleges the US Department of Justice, persuaded NatWest to sell its interest in one of its subsidiaries, LJM Swap, for much less than its market value, netting two Enron executives a profit of $12 million and pocketing $7.3 million among themselves.
Yet the case of the Bermingham Three says much about the current subservient state of the ‘special relationship’ between Britain and America, and the extent to which the Blair government has been prepared to compromise the human rights of Britons in order to gain the approval of the White House.
Comments
Join the debate for just £1 a month
Be part of the conversation with other Spectator readers by getting your first three months for £3.
UNLOCK ACCESS Just £1 a monthAlready a subscriber? Log in