Bankers Plead Guilty in Enron Case

Source: AP

HOUSTON (AP) — Three British bankers who were set to go to trial for their roles in a fraudulent scheme with former Enron Chief Financial Officer Andrew Fastow changed their pleas to guilty Wednesday.

David Bermingham, Giles Darby and Gary Mulgrew originally pleaded not guilty to seven counts of wire fraud. Prosecutors alleged that they colluded with Fastow in a secret financial scam in 2000 to enrich themselves at their employers' expense.

They were set to go on trial in January, but each pleaded guilty to one count of wire fraud in a court hearing before U.S. District Judge Ewing Werlein Jr.

The three former executives at Greenwich NatWest, a unit of Royal Bank of Scotland Group PLC, became a cause celebre in Britain throughout extradition proceedings that lasted two years.

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It took seven years.

How many years will it be before the crooks behind all this credit mess we are having now are brought to justice? Probably none. No one is even calling it the fraud that it is.

They were among the first people to be extradited under a new extradition agreement, under which the US no longer had to show any evidence of guilt to extradite suspects, just a charge in the USA. Their lawyers fought this through various courts, saying they couldn't be guaranteed a fair trial in the US any more, and there wasn't even any examination of evidence in the UK under the new agreement.

As Wikipedia summarises:

Gah

What a horrible way to get justice for the Enron swindle. We get the Enron crooks but lose another big chunk of our rights.

Thanks for the info

and the Bush administration was scared sh*tless of the discovery phase of that civil suit. So, they immediately slapped some charges on them, so that they would be unable to testify in the civil suit, for fear of implicated themselves in the criminal cases which the U.S. government was conveniently holding over its head.

This has been the history of the U.S. prosecutions. Get anyone who might testify in a civil suit and who might implicate Thomas White, Karl Rove, Dick Cheney or George Bush indicted in federal court so that they can never talk.

Notice that the wheels of justice have moved as slow as molasses in most of the Enron cases, but because the lawsuit involving these guys was filed very quickly, the U.S, government filed its charges with lightening fast speed.

Don't we have enough con-artists here that we don't need to import them?

The banker who was 'suicided', but not very well, because the police had his death listed as "unexplained"?

I think this is the case that him in it at one point.