Headline, March25, 2014

"' HEY -HEY- BUSTER ! : 

THE NEXT CRASH -THEN ? "'

"There's a saying in the  City  that you get the  next crash when the last person who remembers the previous crash retires, and:

That's what happened,"  he smiles grimly.

"The younger dealers had no memory of the  defaulting mortgages    -they were selling these mortgages off on  the assumption that they were zero mortgage defaults.

The banks should never have bought these vehicles, but they did and we'll be cleaning up the mess for years."

Even though  The NatWest Three were jailed for fraud, there's a certain  Karma here.

The trio's campaign against their extradition to the  US  failed, and at  6am on  13 July,  2006, they turned themselves in to Croydon police station in south London.

They were then driven to  Gatwick airport  in Surrey and met by  six US marshals   -two each-   to escort them onto a plane destined for Houston.

It was a normal scheduled flight, and they sat at the back of the aircraft with a marshal on each side.

When they landed, the pilot announced there were  "special passengers"   on the plane who needed to meet with some dignitaries". 

As they disembarked, they saw the dignitaries    -more than 20 law enforcement officers.

In February  2008,  the trio were sentenced to  37 months each   -just over three years-  and they were instructed to repay $7.35 million to NatWest's parent company, The Royal Bank of Scotland.

To Bermingham's obvious  unease, they were told that they would serve their time separately:

Mulgrew in FCI Big Spring, Texas.  Darby in FCI Allenwood, Pennsylvania, Bermingham in FCI Lompoc, California.

'Just before I finished this piece.' recalls the author, I phoned Bermingham's wife in the UK. "We hear that David may be released to the UK  -prison system- in the next month or so," she says.

A Houston Chronicle journalist seemed exasperated when I relayed this. "A Canadian who headed two key Enron divisions:

David Delainey, has already been allowed to go north of the border to serve his sentence in his homeland, and he was released after a month," she said bitterly:

 "There's a lot of people in Houston very angry about that." 

It did seem, she said, that three men would have to pay the Royal Bank of Scotland  $7.3 million before they could return to the UK.

"Considering they've had the money since  2000, they could still have profited from a bit of smart investing," she says. Then she chuckled. "Unless they 'd bought SPVs of course."

IF,  as expected, they return to the UK in the next couple of months, they'll find a country still on the verge of free fall, having spent years standing on a     "' stack of wobbly deals "'   "and legal sleights of hand" :

That were refined and exported from their little financial laboratory on the Connecticut coast. They'll meet experts without a clue, unfathomable contradictions in almost every headline:

And the lurching feeling that maybe no one in the world knows what to do.

They may even start to miss the strange security of life in a federal prison:

Where the guys  wanted to  stick a knife  in your back actually carried real ones instead of doing it by computer in a bank  6,000   miles away.  

Thus ends this tale:

David Bermingham, Gary Mulgrew and  Giles Darby became infamous as the so-called   "NatWest Three"    -the bankers who helped bring down US energy giant Enron.

But could the method of extreme trading they popularised be responsible for the .............Credit Crunch?

I Think so !!! 

Enron was looking for a way to hide huge debt. The  NatWest Three were looking for a hugely profitable client:

"" It was love at first sight. ""

With respectful dedication to the Students, Professors and Teachers of the World. See Ya all on !WOW! -the World Students Society Computers-Internet-Wireless:

"'To Win The World Over "'

Good Night & God Bless!

SAM Daily Times - the Voice of the Voiceless