For five years I lived in fear of prison

There had hardly been a day in the last five years, Kevin Maxwell said yesterday, that he had not thought about the threat of going to prison.

In an exclusive interview with The Independent hours after a judge ruled that it would not be fair for him to face a second trial for fraud, Mr Maxwell described the intense pressure his wife and family had been under. Sitting in the offices of Westbourne Communications and Maximov Publications in Mayfair, central London, and surrounded by balloons inscribed with congratulations, his relief was obvious.

He said he had "read up on the prison rules and the children had this Toad of Toad Hall idea of me sitting in a dank dungeon with weeping walls. We told them, 'Daddy might not be around'. We didn't hide it from them," he said.

Mr Maxwell said that unless someone had been through the process and on the receiving end of criminal proceedings it was impossible for them to imagine the threat of loss of liberty, the sense of loss of freedom. "It was with me every single day for nearly five years."

His mood visibly fluctuating between joy and anger, Mr Maxwell turned on his accusers, the Serious Fraud Office. The SFO, he said, was "fixated with the desire to secure a conviction". If there was a fault in a system that had seen his case and that of his co-accused take years and absorb some pounds 30m of taxpayers' money, it lay with the SFO. Not only was it an investigator, he said, but it was a prosecutor as well.

From the outset since his original arrest in the glare of television lights, Mr Maxwell said, the Fraud Office had been determined to "clean up the City, to use terror and every weapon at its disposal". Mr Maxwell went on: "If you look at the SFO's annual report, how do they measure themselves? We live in the age of the Chartermark, where hospitals and schools publish league tables. But what is their measure? It is solely their conviction rate. They have a dual role as the executive arm of investigations and as a prosecutor. It is not the prosecutor's role to secure convictions. It is his job to present the case to the jury and that is all."

In a strident defence of the jury system, Mr Maxwell attacked those who claimed his acquittal at the first trial was proof the centuries-old institution did not work in big fraud cases. In a veiled reference to the Attorney General, Sir Nicholas Lyell, who said after Mr Maxwell's acquittal that the jury system in fraud cases might need reviewing, Mr Maxwell replied: "I don't understand why this debate is allowed to continue in the absence of proper research. The US system has not collapsed because people there have conducted research into juries. It is absurd that . . . we know little about juries, about what they comprehend and how they operate."

Before people rush to demand change, he said, they should think carefully about the alternatives. He claimed it was crazy for them to call for the replacement of a jury by an independent City expert. "It simply would not work where there is such a small clique of lawyers, accountants, actuaries and bankers in the City; the conflicts of interest this would present would be huge."

He said people "should not slander the jury but do some research into whether they comprehend the case in front of them". Paying tribute to the five jurors from his first trial who attended his abuse process application, Mr Maxwell said, "They were frustrated that all their work, all their deliberation, have come to nothing."

If his father, Robert, had still been alive and the pounds 400m "black hole" in the pension fund had been discovered, his son said, "Of course there would have been a trial. But he would have had a defence."

If Robert had not died - his son maintains to this day his death in 1991 was an accident, not suicide - Kevin said the circumstances would have been different. There would not have been as much negative publicity. Instead, his father became "demonised, he was turned into a mythical figure like Bad King Richard or King John".

The decision to hold a second trial, he said, had infuriated him. "I gave evidence for a long time, the judge summed up, the jury went out - nobody can say I had not had a real trial." Mr Maxwell said it was too early to talk about future plans. "I can say to my children I will be coming home, I will be around, which is marvellous."

The legal cost

Estimated global sum

alleged to have been

involved: pounds 2bn

Estimated global cost of criminal proceedings:

pounds 20-30m

Cost of legal aid for a total of six defendants up to

30 June this year:

pounds 8,429,000

Average administration cost of Crown Court jury trial:

pounds 2,100 for each of the 131 days