The staghounds
The bold gendarmes of the City like to run in the little boys who do no harm — it keeps up their arrest rate — but leave the serious villains safely on the opposite side of the road. So we see that the Department of Trade has referred to the Director of Public Prosecutions certain cases of suspected multiple applications for British Telecom shares, and the Director is considering them with a view to bringing charges. It is not suggested that anyone has laid improper hands on a penny piece. The worst that can have happened is that , someone applied for British Telecom shares under more than one name, in the hope of getting more than one allocation of shares, and taking a profit on them. Some have no doubt succeeded in this, but they will not be prosecuted, because they have not been detected. Those who tried it and failed will have got no share at all, and will also have been left out of pocket, as the receiving bank cashed all their multiple cheques and sat' on the money for quite a while before sending it back. Some of that money may never get back to its source, especially where applications were made in the names of such popular men of straw as Mr Michael Mouse. It is to be hoped that as these grave accusations fall into the in-tray of the Director of Public Prosecutions, they will not distract his attention from his pending file. There rest the papers from Lloyd's of London, where something like £80 million of the members' money appears to have been misapplied. The DPP has reached his decision on only one of these allegations, and in that case he decided not to prosecute. No doubt the • stags of Telecom are an easier target.
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