Is living at sea the best way to escape this Brexit nightmare?

The first time I was ever commissioned by the Daily Mail, the voice on the phone said: ‘You used to be a banker, you must know all about fraud. Everyone else is saying the SFO is rubbish, so we want a piece that says “We support the fraud fighters”.’ Not my field, I said, and possibly not my opinion. ‘Are you a journalist or aren’t you?’ barked the voice. ‘A thousand words by teatime.’ I wrote the piece and the BBC rang twice the next day to interview me as a City fraud expert. It was a lesson in how the media stays half a day ahead of its consumers in terms of specialist knowledge — and in the thanklessness of the task of the Serious Fraud Office, which then as now stood accused of failing to nail widespread financial wrongdoing, despite ‘heavy-handed’ methods, and of achieving shamefully low conviction rates.

The headline story (this was June 1993) was that of Asil Nadir, whose Polly Peck conglomerate had collapsed and who had fled to his native Cyprus shortly after the SFO brought 66 charges against him. Seventeen years later, he returned to be convicted of multi-million-pound theft: justice was done, the SFO’s dogged modus operandi vindicated. Can the same be said of its seven-year investigation into Libor interest-rate rigging, which closed last week?

To recap, 11 major banks have been fined more than $9 billion between them by regulators for submitting false reports of their borrowing costs in the London interbank market that were used to fix benchmark rates affecting many areas of financial activity. During the 2008 crisis, this was sometimes done to make banks look more credit–worthy than they really were; more often, it was done to boost traders’ profits or cap losses.

The participation of so many banks might suggest that the entire market was corrupt; but the SFO, tasked with identifying individual criminal acts, brought charges in the end only against 13 individuals for Libor dealings and another 11 for manipulating equivalent euro rates.