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.

In the unique manner of US prosecutors, there was not only a scramble to avenge the wronged and financially wounded city of Houston, but also to put as large as possible a notch in their belts.There is fierce competition between US and district attorneys for headlines, and thus acceleration up the political ladder or into the highest echelons of the private sector bar. The United States has five per cent of the world’s population, 25 per cent of its incarcerated people and 50 per cent of the world’s lawyers. The legal profession takes about 10 per cent of the country’s GDP, approximately $1.5 trillion, a sum close to the entire GDP, depending on exchange rates, of Russia, India or Canada.

US criminal justice is based on the almost completely corrupt manipulation of the plea bargain, in which suspects, or alleged suspects, are interviewed and advised that they can have immunity in exchange for miraculous revenances of memory that incriminate the prime targets — failing which, however flimsy or nonexistent the evidence, they too will be charged.