Outlook: Time moves on, but the Guinness Four cannot

It's almost exactly 15 years to the day since Department of Trade and Industry inspectors were sent into Guinness, marking the start of what was perhaps the defining corporate scandal of the 1980s. All these years later and the case is still chugging unhappily along. From the moment they were sent down, all four of those convicted as ring leaders have fought tooth and nail to have their convictions quashed, and now finally, many millions in legal expenses later, they sense victory is within their grasp.

Forget the stuff about jury nobbling and the non-disclosure of evidence. Though these allegations add to the impression of a terrible miscarriage of justice, which is what the defendants want you to think it is, the appeal is primarily based on the premise that the four were wrongly convicted because they were compelled into incriminating themselves.

Which is what makes this a very different appeal from those we are used to seeing. This is not another Guildford Four or Birmingham Six. There is no question but that Ernest Saunders, Gerald Ronson, Tony Parnes and Jack Lyons did the things they were accused of doing.

A later DTI report on the affair went even further than the courts in accusing Mr Saunders not just of share price manipulation but of intending to steal company money that passed through his numbered Swiss bank account as well. The whole affair, the inspectors concluded, had been characterised by a cynical disregard for laws and regulations, a cavalier misuse of company money, and a contempt for truth and common honesty.

You can't get much more damning than that, so what's the argument about? Those wretched DTI transcripts, that's what. Did they make a difference? Well, who knows what was going through the jury's minds, but from the outside the DTI transcripts certainly looked like the final nail in the coffin. After they were read to the court, there could be no doubt about the trial's outcome. It's all very well to use the DTI's powers to compel evidence for the purpose of producing a report, but was it justice to use such evidence in a criminal trial?

The whole issue was explored exhaustively at the time, both in and out of court. The defendants rightly pointed out that even a rapist or terrorist would have enjoyed better protection under the law, but the desire for retribution was high, and nobody wanted to listen.

Eventually, the European courts did listen, ruling that it was a breach of human rights law introduced into Britain after the Guinness convictions. The issue facing the Appeal Court is whether that judgment should be applied retrospectively. Public hangings and floggings were once regarded as acceptable, but we don't do it any longer. Does that mean that every case of it in the past was therefore wrong as well?

Were it not for the potentially very large compensation cheques that ride on the outcome, the whole appeal would seem more than a trifle pointless. There's not much sympathy for the Guinness Four out there, nobody is going to believe they were guiltless what ever the Appeal Court says, and there will undoubtedly be a lot of public anger if compensation is involved. If the Guinness Four were not responsible for the Guinness scandal, who on earth was? The tooth fairy?

The world has changed a lot since Guinness, and with the benefit of hindsight the way in which the authorities went about dealing with the scandal seems ham-fisted and inappropriate. If Guinness were to happen today, the whole matter would most probably have been dealt with through the civil processes of the Financial Services Authority, where the standards of proof required are not so high and whose powers to fine and blackball would have been applied a lot more widely than the guilty Guinness four. If there were a criminal case at all there could be no question of evidence obtained under duress. The new system promises to be more effective and fairer all round.

Bowker express

Richard Bowker, the new man in charge of Britain's train set, believes in apple pie, motherhood and "a bigger, better, safer railway capable of playing a larger role in meeting local, regional, national and international transport needs". We can all say amen to that.

The new chairman of the Strategic Rail Authority also says we have to recognise that our railways "exist primarily to serve the needs of passengers". That a regulator should think it necessary to state something so self-evident is a shocking indictment of how badly the network has been left to run down.

So far, so uncontroversial. What is more interesting about Mr Bowker's initial observations, is what he doesn't believe in. Judging by his first outing yesterday before a conference of rail and transport anoraks, this includes Brian Souter's idea of vertical integration between track and train. Nor is he very keen on the large number of individual train operators clogging up the network.

What he does like are "quick wins", which is what his political boss Stephen Byers likes too, only so far all he's managed to achieve is own goals. As Mr Bowker should surely know, there is no such thing as a quick fix for the railways, such is the structural nature of the problem, born of decades of under-investment.

We must wait for his strategic plan in January to assess the new controller's long-term vision for the industry. Mr Bowker deserves his day at the footplate and his style may yet prove more effective than the confrontational approach of his predecessor, Sir Alastair Morton. But while Mr Byers is in charge and the dead hand of the DTLR weighs even more heavily on the regulator, don't bet on it.

Enron bomb blast

At the bottom of nearly all bear markets, something big goes spectacularly bust. In the mid 1970s it was Burmah Oil, in 1998 it was Long-Term Capital Management, and maybe this time around, it's Enron. On both those two previous occasions, the experience of a big bankruptcy proved cathartic. The immediate response was that the end of the world was nigh, but it didn't last. The following day everyone woke up to see collectively that whatever it was that was threatening global catastrophe had gone away and that things were in fact fine.

Could that be the experience this time around as well? Enron is already assured a position in the record books as the largest ever insolvency (until the next one that is), with total debts of nearly $32bn, but although the affair looks destined to end in an equally record breaking mountain of litigation, as yet there's no sign of it sending anyone else to the wall.

One by one, the banks are coming out of the woodwork to admit to an exposure but in no case so far does the situation seem life threatening. In its third-quarter trading statement yesterday, Barclays didn't even mention Enron, this despite the fact that it is listed in Enron's Chapter 11 filings as the largest unsecured creditor with a total exposure of $126m. Even so, Barclays has not increased its estimate of full-year bad debt provisions of a net £1.1bn. That humiliation might still lie in the future, but despite the warnings of systemic meltdown, the world seems to have survived the Enron bomb blast with surprisingly little damage.

j.warner@independent.co.uk