Corporate Manslaughter and Corporate Homicide Bill

I was going to say that the Minister made a passing reference to a very important point raised by the noble Lord, Lord Wedderburn, on the first day of Committee last week, which he cast like a fly over the water but no fish bit. It was a very important point that should be borne in mind. Both the Minister today and the noble Lord, Lord Wedderburn, made reference to the fiduciary responsibility within a board, but, if I heard them correctly, they presented it as though it were a means by which there should be a duty of care in respect of fiduciary responsibility. I should like to reverse the point for Members of the Committee. I believe that in this case, and many others, fiduciary responsibility will be fielded by boards as a mitigation and justification for committing manslaughter. Perhaps I may put a real case to the Committee—it is case C among my examples. We were diving in the Torres Strait between Port Darwin and Papua New Guinea and the wind was so bad that we could not complete a contract by midnight, without which a £3 million penalty would be imposed on me, which I could not pay. I had a fiduciary responsibility to my shareholders not to incur a £3 million penalty, so I dived on and killed a diver. My justification for that would be that I could not bankrupt the company for £3 million and so I had to carry on diving and hope that the risk did not materialise. It did. That is the reverse of the point that I think was raised by the noble Lord, Lord Wedderburn, and the Minister. By the way, I am not pleading guilty to murder because there were other justifications in that case which would cause an unnecessary complication at the moment. However, I think that the issue of fiduciary responsibility will be hugely important as a potential mitigating factor in many boards’ defence, and it needs to be borne in mind as we go forward.