David Bermingham was driving to Poole in Dorset on Wednesday evening when he heard that David Cameron and Barack Obama had agreed to review the workings of the Anglo-American extradition treaty.
As one of the first British citizens caught by that treaty, he had conflicting emotions. The cynic in him warned that it was just another false dawn in his long fight to reform legislation that came close to destroying his life. The optimist encouraged him to think that “some common sense might finally be restored to this Kafkaesque situation”.
Until it is, he insists, the fight goes on. Mr Bermingham was one of the NatWest Three, and the last time The Times interviewed him was in a lawyer’s office in Houston in 2006. He had an electronic tag that would tell the authorities if he broke his curfew, left the city or approached its airport.
He, Gary Mulgrew and Giles Darby had lost a protracted campaign against extradition four months earlier and were “free” on bail while they fought an equally fierce campaign to prove their innocence. They lost that, too, and spent 17 months in prison.
This time we meet in very different surroundings: a smart hotel by the Thames in the Berkshire village of Streatley near Mr Bermingham’s home.
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One might have thought this former Army officer would want to forget an ordeal that consumed six years of his life, cost him well over £1 million in legal fees and left him with a criminal conviction that renders him largely unemployable and something of a social pariah. On the contrary, he can’t forget. He calls the 2003 treaty “the monkey on my back”.
Since regaining his liberty two years ago, he has led a campaign to change a law that, he argues, flouts the most fundamental rights of British citizens, including habeas corpus and the presumption of innocence.
“I resolved in prison that I’d try to make some good come from a very bad situation,” he says. “I feel I have a responsibility to speak out for those who don’t have a voice.”
To that end he has written a book, A Price To Pay, which seeks to expose the injustices of the Extradition Act by recounting his own story. He will give the proceeds to the pressure groups Liberty and Fair Trials International.
The NatWest Three were accused of conspiring with officials of Enron, the infamous Texan energy giant, to defraud NatWest, their employer, by persuading it to sell its interest in an investment vehicle called SwapSub for $1 million. Without telling NatWest, they bought a $250,000 stake in SwapSub that they sold weeks later for $7.3 million. Each made £900,000 after tax.
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Mr Bermingham admits that they were foolish, unethical and motivated by “greed and vanity”. He says he will regret it for the rest of his life. But he insists that NatWest was paid a fair price, and denies any criminal intent. As he tells it, they went voluntarily to the Financial Services Authority (FSA) when Enron collapsed amid a welter of fraud allegations in 2001, and gave a full account of their conduct. The FSA found nothing unlawful, but passed their account to the US authorities, which sought their extradition even though they were British citizens working in Britain for a British bank.
He says that the US authorities saw them as “low-hanging fruit” who would incriminate Enron officials. Desperate to avoid extradition, the three men urged the FSA, Serious Fraud Office and Director of Public Prosecutions to prosecute them in Britain, but to no avail. Nor did NatWest, their alleged victim, seek their prosecution.
Their extradition caused such a furore that Tony Blair intervened to ensure that they got bail in the US. That gave them a chance of mounting a defence, but they had no power to subpoena evidence or witnesses in Britain. All but one of 36 former NatWest colleagues refused to testify voluntarily.
Months passed. They were 5,000 miles from home, haemorrhaging cash to five sets of lawyers on both sides of the Atlantic, and causing their families untold suffering. Mr Bermingham dedicates his book to his wife, Emma, and three children, saying: “I put them through hell and they never flinched. I don’t deserve them.”
The bankers knew that if they went to trial and lost, they faced not only bankruptcy but long prison terms with no possibility of repatriation. As their emotional vulnerability grew, the prosecution sought, unsuccessfully, to persuade each to incriminate the others in return for leniency. Eventually, after the trial was delayed a third time, they folded. They agreed to plead guilty without ever having their day in court.
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They accepted 37-month sentences, and the prosecutors then looked for “crimes” to match those terms. “It was as blatant as that,” he says. The sentences matched that of Michael Kopper, a senior Enron official who not only played a central and criminal role in the company’s collapse but destroyed records to conceal it. He, however, had inside information to trade with prosecutors determined to convict the top executives.
Mr Bermingham spent seven months in US penitentiaries, then ten more months in British prisons. But incarceration changed him for the better. At NatWest, he earned a seven-figure salary in an office that was “one big bucket of testosterone”. In prison he came to appreciate the importance of freedom, friends and family. .
Now 49, he is no longer super-rich and the income he derives from designing offbeat investment funds at home is a fraction of what it was. He spends much of his time lobbying a Government whose members criticised the Extradition Act in opposition but — before Wednesday — had done little in office. It was, he claims, “transfixed by the notion that we need to be subservient to the US in all matters”.
© David Bermingham, 2012. Extracted from A Price to Pay, to be published by Gibson Square on March 26 at £8.99 and as an e-book at £2.99. Available at £8.54, p&p free, from the Times Bookshop on 0845 2712134; thetimes.co.uk/bookshop