CJM

CR]MI\ \L 1LST1CE MATTERS

AND PUNISHMENT
Bonfire of the Harp-ies: their cases reach the courts or they have he told everyone that custodial sentences
paid their lawyers). were uppermost in his mind to mark the
Punishing White- So what is to be done about sen- gravity of the offence, and went care-
Collar Crimes. tencing the few high-profile cases that fully through the principles of sentencing
are convicted? The first point to make is which the accused might well not have
White-collar crime is a spuriously that, rather than being hidden away like heard previous to their Close Encounters
coherent label which gets attached to those administratively 'fined' by the of a Third Degree Kind with the Serious
an enormously variegated set of be- Revenue and Customs and Excise, the Fraud Office. It was Gentleman versus
haviours. To consider that Guinness, full blast of publicity is faced by any Players. Just down the road, the Test
Barlow Clowes, Blue Arrow and high-status persons. Fortunately, now Match was being played out to a draw at
Maxwell - let alone credit card or that we have Tom Wolfe's Bonfi re of the the Oval. But in this game, the Players
bankrupty fraud by former armed Vanities to serve as a mirror to any oth- had already been told by the jury that
robbers - are the 'same thing' is ludi- erwise unselfconscious radicalism, we they had lost.
crous, though no more so perhaps than can be supportive of the rich on trial After the general homily about the
treating 'violent crime' or 'drug traf- while feeling virtuous because we are overwhelming evidence of dishonesty,
ficking' homogeneously. The danger not hounding them. We can be - and I each defendant stood up to take his
is that because people are of (rela- was - suitably nauseated by the disgust- medicine in turn. They had all been
tively) high status, they will be lumped ing spectacle of journalists whose ex- warned by their lawyers that they could
together as a social category in a way penses claims would make Olivier Roux expect to go down for a long time. But
most ISTD members would abhor if - the former Finance Director of Guin- the length of time the process of sen-
the category was 'blacks' or 'gypsies'. ness - blanch, baying at the heels of the tencing took seemed horrendous. Ter-
To enter the world of the serious distressed families of the defendants who rorists and gangsters expect a short lec-
fraud trial is best likened to reading Alice had been convicted of all but one charge ture on the evil of their actions, but this
in Wonderland, though few defendants left to them. The end of the Guinness trial was too much like a penology textbook
have their heads chopped off by the Red was Justice for All time, as the jury - for these unreflective market practitio-
Judge! For example, in February 1992, representatives of the We Hate Rich Jews ners.
four defendants were convicted in the Who Think They Are Above The Law Ernest Saunders kept up his mar-
Britannia Park case, some five and a And They Are Not Because We Have tyred air as he was given his five years:
half years after the initial police investi- Just Convicted Them class warfare front this was a Show Trial, and he knew he
gation (which was conducted as quickly line brigade - turned up to hear what was the innocent victim of an Establish-
as possible) and after a seventeen month courteously partician Mr Justice Henry ment Conspiracy. For him this was
trial: the heaviest sentence was four years. would do to the 'thieves' who had been merely another stage on the way to the
To many outsiders, the effort seems seriously rich before these crimes. They European Commission of Human Rights
disproportionate to the result, though at and as many other voyeurs - your corre- and anything less would have been a
least the costs of imprisonment were spondent included - crowded into the subtle stratagem to reduce public (or
very modest compared with the £3 mil- low-ceilinged, unatmospheric Court Two City) sympathy with him. Next came
lion spent on the trial. The Guinness Anthony Parnes, the stockbroker who
case had to be split into four, and the had been labelled by the judge the 're-
Serious Fraud Office has now abandoned Like other professional criminals,
cruiting officer' of the conspiracy. (Not
Guinness II because of one defendant's criminal professionals are often really officer class, though: closer to an
mental condition resulting from repre- asset-less by the time their cases NCO, or Sergeant Bilko.) The tension of
senting himself and Guinness III (in- reach the courts... it all - the media circus and the length of
volving the most prestigious defendant) the judge's homilies - were just too much.
because of fresh evidence - six years This brought about the human drama
at Southwark Crown Court to hear the
after the takeover - which makes convic- that so delighted the popular media, as he
final stage in the dramaturgical White-
tion improbable. In Blue Arrow, the keeled over and banged his head on the
Collar Crime of the Century be played
judge directed the acquittals, inter alia, bench as he fainted. The courtroom had
out.
of corporate defendants County NatWest, to be cleared. The judge then pronounced
NatWest Investment Bank, and UBS sentence on Gerald Ronson, the self-
The judge knew what to do. In
Phillips and Drew, and of a solicitor who made entrepreneur said to be the 15th
fairly dry tones he read out his speech
advised on the transactions. The four richest man in Britain. He got 12 months
on the Sins of the City to make clear
persons convicted got suspended sen- in prison plus a £5 million fine. After
what he and the jury understood but
tences, and were neither fined nor dis- consultation, his counsel proposed 9
none of the defendants accepted: that
qualified from company directorships. months to pay, a lengthy gestation pe-
what they had done was seriously
The danger is that because of their com- riod that would allow him to realise the
wrong. The principles of genuine mar-
plexity and the ancient legal system assets after his release from jail (and earn
kets had to be upheld; the metaphors of
through which they have to pass, those at least £500,000 interest on them in the
takeover wars, of win at all costs, had to
who commit serious social harms may meantime). As The Sun, with character-
bow before the superior social principle
escape scot-free (although, like other istic delicacy, put on the front page the
of 'play up, play up and play the game'.
professional criminals, criminal profes- next morning: '£5 million: that's fine by
There was indeed a breathless hush in
sionals are often asset-less by the time Ronson'.
the close atmosphere of the courtroom as