CITY AND SUBURBAN
Albert and the Lion come to court, because somebody had to be summonsed
CHRISTOPHER FILDES
Iwould not hang a cat at all, and I cer- tainly would not misjudge one on the evi- dence of Olivier Roux. The chief witness for the prosecution in the Guinness trials has always had to explain why his evidence given on oath in the box differed from his evidence given on oath to the Board of Trade's inspectors. The jury in the last of these trials, Guinness IV, may have shared my reservations. It has acquitted Thomas Ward, the Washington lawyer — seven years, now, after the events. There is a whiff of those wild days and a sharp taste of Guinness about Judi Bevan's new book The Insiders, reviewed this week on page 40 by Roger Seelig, who featured in Guinness II. That trial was abandoned, and Guinness III never got to court at all. Guinness I saw the prosecution's only successes, and brought down Ernest Saunders, who (as the court has been hearing) so thoughtfully lent Mr Ward the use of his Swiss bank account. Mr Saunders has now taken his case to the European Court, arguing that the inspec- tors were improperly set to do the job of the police, so the Guinness I result is no certainty, and Lord Spens is still chasing his costs after being acquitted in Guinness II. At least the rival series has ended — having spent a year in court on Blue Arrow I and got nowhere, the Crown did not have the face to proceed with Blue Arrow II. When the arrests were made, a senior City regula- tor told me that there was no case to answer, and, after £40 million of income had been generated for assorted lawyers, the courts agreed. These prosecutions were launched on the principle laid down by Stanley Holloway in Albert and the Lion:
Somebody's got to be summonsed, And that were decided upon.
Summonsing, as Albert's mother discov- ered, turned out to be the easy part.
Fair and open
MR Justice Turner (Guinness IV) has now joined his learned brothers Henry, McKin- non and Brooke (Guinness I and II, Blue Arrow I and II) in saying that financial fraud trials cannot go on like this. Saying so could also be described as the easy part. The difficult part has been best done by the Bar Council's working party under Jeremy Roberts, QC. Charges, he says, must be simpler and fewer and better-defined — not, as now, brought in by the dozen and abandoned piecemeal as the case goes on. A fair and open system of plea bargaining would short-circuit trials. Charges which are not likely to bring prison sentences would be better handled by the regulators, using their powers, delegated under law, which stop short of prison but not short of ruin. (I would add that they must be seen to be fair and effective, something that the Banking Acts more or less preclude.) One question posed by Mr Roberts will not go away. Why should the law deny the right of silence to suspected fraudsters, but not to suspected terrorists, murderers or rapists — to Ernest Saunders but not to Sean O'Semtex?
Notes and queries
MAKING Lord Henley look a fool may be a work of supererogation but the Bank of England has achieved it. When the Bank of England's new notes came under fire in the House of Lords, from noble lords who (like so many common people) could not tell the £20 from the £5 or the £10, Lord Henley, from the Government benches, said they were meant to be like that. It would keep shopkeepers on the qui vive, forcing them to look at notes more carefully and so to make the forger's life harder. Now, though, the Bank is varying the designs of all three notes to make them easier to tell apart. So it should — but considering that the Bank has been in the note-issuing business for the best part of 300 years, and makes a profit of £1.8 billion a year from its monopoly, you might have thought that by now it could get this kind of thing right first time. It might be something for the Bank's dozen non-executive directors to do instead of corporate governance. Or the Bank could take its cue from the US Treasury, which has been issuing its popular green- backs in all denominations for many years. When Philip Marlowe, in Raymond Chan- dler's The Long Goodbye, was sent a por-
trait of Madison he spotted it at once as a $5,000 bill. This puts Madison one up on Wren, on the £50 note. When farthings were worth having there were wrens on them, too. No doubt inflation, for all the hopes the Bank expresses in its colourful new report on the subject, will make the new notes indistinguishably worthless.
Oh, calamity
I WISH I could hear Eliot Janeway's growl- ing verdict on Clintonomics. I can picture him, wrapped in his golden robe, every inch the sage, prophesying doom over the scrambled eggs at Claridge's. Not for noth- ing did he earn the nickname of Calamity Janeway. Alas, he has died too soon to hear the President tell America's tax-payers that all previous or pre-election statements were (as Nixon's spokesman had to say) inopera- tive. Eliot, who prowled the frontier between markets and governments and knew the Democrats when they were New Dealers, would recognise the signs. It is easier — as we are discovering — for a gov- ernment of any party to run up a deficit than to run it down. It then becomes easier to raise taxes than to cut spending. Easier still for a coalition of interest groups on the left. For all his promises of change, Mr Clinton may be the kind of Democrat whose politics the old sage understood so well: 'We'll tax and tax, and spend and spend, and elect and elect.'
Fragments that remain
THE cookie
has. crumbled. Mrs Fields, the chocolate chip cookie maker, is leaving the London stock-market, and its luckless shareholders find themselves stuck with a 21)2 per cent stake in an unquoted American company deep in debt and losing money. It must stand at a discount to a jam tart, let alone a cookie, and bears out my theory that a foreign company which avoids its home stock-market and comes to London instead is an investment to skip. ISC, which went on to wreck Ferranti, was another. All that surprised me about Mrs Fields was to see it brought to market by the upper- crusty house of Cazenove. I can only sup- pose that Caz's younger chaps felt a certain rapport with the Fields partners, Debby and Randy.
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