The American way of justice

Conrad Black sympathises with the NatWest Three — victims of British cowardice and a corrupt US legal system

It was the misfortune of David Bermingham and his co-defendants to be very peripherally connected to the Enron debacle. Enron was the ultimate hot financial client for a merchant banker and designer of sophisticated financial vehicles, the author’s occupation at Greenwich National Westminster.

Bermingham’s offence was to produce a spectacularly imaginative new structure for an existing financial company, which impressed the Enron financial officers, at a time when Greenwich National Westminster was being offered for sale and NatWest itself was a takeover candidate. His plan was so original that, as he wrote, quoting Blackadder, ‘If you could put a tail on it, you could call it a weasel.’ Emails at the time that referred to the delicate position they were in as their employer was being shopped to possible buyers and everything was frozen — though they tried to conduct business as usual as best they could — were later misrepresented by American prosecutors as evidence of fraudulent intent, in collusion with Enron and against the buyer of NatWest, the Royal Bank of Scotland, which made no such contention.