Fraud (Trials without a Jury) Bill

My Lords, as sensibly prompted by the noble Baroness, Lady Mallalieu, I shall not start by saying that I am not a lawyer. However, I have had great experience of using the jury system in fraud cases, and it might be helpful to have some practical experience of what that has meant. Over the past 25 years, I have been the chairman of11 public companies. At the time that they came into my hands, those11 companies had been recording aggregate shareholder fund losses of just on £2 billion, despite the aggregate value of the frauds against them probably coming out at only half a billion pounds. The emphasis of this is that frauds of this nature are frauds against a whole community. The community affected is not only the people who work in the companies and the shareholders and pension funds around them, but also the traders who are creditors awaiting payment and who will never get it and probably go bust. Therefore, it is right that a jury should effectively speak for a community, with the voice of a community, which is what it does. To take the trial into another city, into the hands of a single, detached judge does not give the community the opportunity to assess and, as appropriate, judge what has taken place. Of the 11 public companies that I have had in my hands, we took fraud proceedings against the chairmen of four—chairmen who had immediately preceded me. Every one of them was judged guilty by a jury and received a significant custodial sentence. There would have been a fifth charge but the individual concerned died before the charges could be brought. He thereby had presumably opted for trial by a single judge in a higher court. I am sure that he got justice there as he would have done in the jury system here. I am a very satisfied customer of the jury system. On arriving in your Lordships’ House eight months ago I was delighted to find an old friend of mine in the noble Lord, Lord Dear, who was the Chief Constable of West Midlands when I was heavily engaged in that territory. Without doubt, the noble Lord, Lord Dear, ran the best fraud investigation unit that I have ever seen. There are lessons in how he was doing it to which the Home Office should listen, and either prompt him to run a training course for all the other constabularies around the country or get him to write the definitive textbook on the subject. He was absolutely outstanding. It is worth considering what he did that made life so much easier for the juries. His CID team would never take a case on for investigation unless you could prove to the team, as though you were the investigating officers, that there was a fraud. Effectively, you had to go through a mock trial and prove it. Once the team had got into the deal and had taken it on board, it was the only constabulary I ever knew that produced a data room on every bit of evidence that came up. It was the pioneers in doing that electronically. The data could be available to the counsel when the case was being prepared for court. That was a missive simplification of the process. That meant that it could also bring in the legal team that would run the prosecution a great deal earlier than would normally be the case. In this way, we managed get through some extraordinarily complex cases. I remember we had one where the chairman of the company concerned had devised 52 different methods of removing money from a company in one year. This was very complicated. We managed to get completely separate data to show all the various methods. When the case went to court, the prosecution started not at the biggest end—the £600,000 single take—but on a single £700 item. The evidence was incontrovertible. The chairman had written to a lady saying, ““You give me an invoice for £700, I’ll send you a cheque for £700, you give me £500 back and you can keep the other £200””. On that straightforward matter the jury started off knowing the exact nature of what it was dealing with. Thereon, the prosecuting counsel was able to build up all 52 cases, right up to the £1.2 million which had gone missing. At that time, the West Midlands approach was very advanced. I do not know how many others do it today. I would like to illustrate the nature of the juries that we dealt with in those days. One of the cases turned out to be the longest continuous trial in British criminal history. By continuous trial, I mean it sat every working day for 16 months. It was in Wolverhampton Crown Court, ending in April 1993 with a conviction. The judge in that case complained about the deliberate attempts of the defending counsel to confuse the court and the defending counsel was subsequently suspended from practising. The jury still managed to get through the case every day and follow it. Each of those cases had a majority of ladies on the jury. I am a great supporter of housewives as jurors. They are absolutely wonderful. We overlook certain factors about them. I hope that the Government are not implying a lack of confidence in the British housewife as a juror because I think that she is excellent. It would be a gratuitous insult to that fine body of women if the Government meant that. Many of them are highly qualified in their own right; they have frequently worked as analysts or secretaries with the boards of companies which have had troubles. They know where bodies get buried in boardrooms and are expert in knowing where to look and what questions to ask. I have doubts about jurors who have not had the experience of working in industry. If they are 20 or21 years old and have never worked, have come straight from university or whatever, there is a problem. They lack the experience and understanding of what goes on and how business is run. I would exclude them if there could be a positive discrimination against them. The point was made earlier about the difficulty in getting senior businessmen to be available for big trials. I do not think we want them. In the main, they come from the same community as the people who are being tried and have moved in the same circles, but they are not necessarily the right people to act for that community. Therefore they are not desirable jurors. Give me a jury of 12 housewives and I would be delighted. I am familiar with the arguments against the jury, but it is the guarantee of trial by a community of a crime against a community. There is no reason whatever to disrupt that well tried process. There are certain things which could and should be done for the future to make jury trial more effective. We should follow the wonderful example of Southwark Crown Court which has got the most definitive fraud-compatible courtroom anywhere in the country. It has a most accessible database which can be distributed to every member of the jury simultaneously. That is a wonderful facility and we need more of them up and down the country, please. Some consideration should be given to positive discrimination to exclude youths who have not worked, and we should not worry about an imbalance of too many women on a jury because it would work well. In particular, the jury system in this country should not lead us to worry about the time it takes to get a case heard. We have had talk about three months as a maximum. I have never had sucha case running for less than six months, and wehave never failed in getting everybody’s clear understanding. The most impressive act I ever saw was the only jury acquittal I ever had. That is the last issue I will deal with. I suspect that this acquittal would not have happened if a judge had been sitting in isolation. In the extremely complex case, we had a very dominant, bully-boy chairman. He had a finance director working for him who thought that the chairman was God Almighty, and he would do anything for him. The finance director was a sad case; his wife had left him, his mother was dying and he was her only support. He had nothing in his life other than the joy of going to work each day and doing whatever his beloved chairman told him to do. What he told him to do was steal £1 million for him. I did not want that finance director put into court. The noble Lord, Lord Dear, and his colleagues, on the only occasion that we ever had serious disagreement, put him up on a charge. I thought that this was going to be terrible; they are going to send him down, he is going to die and it is wrong. He had not taken any money, he had no inflated salary and it would not have been just. The jury convicted the chairman and acquitted the finance director. Had that gone before a judge in isolation, I suspect that they would have had to convict the finance director as well. He might only have got a suspended sentence, but there would not have been the humanity and the insight that the jury was prepared to bring. It was a remarkable case. If this Bill goes through, I will never be able to look at the image of Magna Carta hanging on our walls again. This will cut the heart out of it and will be the start of the destruction of our liberties in this country. We talk of not having a written constitution but we do; it is hanging on the wall outside.