My parents were immigrants from Eastern Europe. My father came after being conscripted against his will in the Tsarist army and took a tortuous route via Germany and Paris. My mother came from Russian-occupied Poland. We lived in Stepney and my father waited for people to die and sold their clothes in Petticoat Lane market.
Before pop stars all we had were film stars. But there were glamorous lawyers like Hartley Shawcross, whose face was always in the newspapers as he was a prosecutor in the Nuremberg war trials. I’d never met a lawyer. It was a fantasy.
I found in the man who started Peters & Peters someone from a similar background. He pitied me or admired me when I said I was hoping he’d pay me some money. He said: ‘I’ve never paid an articled clerk – it’s unheard of! I’m training you!’ I said: ‘If you don’t pay me I can’t do it.’ We shook on £3 a week.
I became known because I became the president of the London Criminal Court Solicitors’ Association in 1982. Before then I was only known to the denizens of London’s prisons.
I defended a seaman who allegedly killed a fellow seaman. There was a knife fight between the men – one white, one black – and the white one was killed. The black man is incarcerated when the ship was brought to England, and a man who has never been to England in his life finds himself on trial at the Old Bailey. He told me it was self-defence and he had experienced the most awful racist slurs. The court was satisfied that it wasn’t murder. He was sentenced to three years for manslaughter before being deported.
There wasn’t a single person in this kingdom who called himself a white-collar lawyer. We didn’t have anything resembling regulation in the City of London until the end of the ‘80s. The one exception was Lloyd’s of London and a well-known underwriter called Ian ‘Goldfinger’ Posgate found himself prosecuted under an act that he had promoted. I represented him and he was acquitted. I was one of the only games in town when the Serious Fraud Office (SFO) was set up in 1987.
We try to beat people into being good and that doesn’t work with children and it doesn’t work for companies.
No-one was certain what was meant by economic crime but the one thing people knew was that we didn’t have the resources or police officers and judges who could understand these concepts. There were judges struggling to understand what a commodity was.
I was probably the only defence lawyer who gave evidence to the Roskill committee, which recommended setting up the Unified Fraud Office. It was decided it wasn’t a good idea to create an agency called UFO as it would attract ridicule and there was a turf war in Whitehall. So we had the SFO.
The SFO was a victim of its own hype as there was an expectation that it would be a mixture of Eliot Ness, Clint Eastwood and Harrison Ford so that no economic criminal would survive. That was an unrealistic expectation and it’s been suffering from it ever since.
We wrote to the SFO saying: ‘You’re going to want to speak with our client Kevin Maxwell so tell us when and we’ll bring him in.’ Instead we had the famous episode where the cops turned up at 7am with TV crews to film him being arrested. It was unnecessary. His wife didn’t even realise there was law enforcement there and said to the camera crews: ‘If you don’t blankety blank off I will call the police.’
It was known as the trial of the 20th Century as Guinness was the first SFO prosecution in 1988. I acted for the stockbroker Anthony Parnes – who was known as The Animal. My approach was to tell the client to keep his opinions to himself. The wisdom among defence lawyers is the quickest way to get your client convicted is to have a cut-throat defence, with one defendant saying: ‘It wasn’t me – it was him.’
It’s been very hard for the SFO. If it had more money it might have attracted better lawyers. It also doesn’t have its own police force. If you’re going to tackle white-collar crime seriously you should have a unified office. In Libor there was a crossover between serious and complex fraud. You need a mixture of expertise.
We have no history in this country of evaluating legislation or regulation on a social science basis looking at the before and after. Everything is anecdotal, which is useless and without scientific validity.
Strong regulation is better than weak regulation but without adequate policing it is useless. The City ought to have got better but the problem now is that when things do go wrong the damage is in billions – not thousands.
We try to beat people into being good and that doesn’t work with children and I don’t think that works for companies. You need firm regulation alongside some method of increasing integrity.
The largest financial centre will attract clean and dirty money. What is sad is that, 30 years on from our first anti-money laundering legislation, far from diminishing, it has increased greatly. That’s depressing not only as a lawyer but as a member of society.
If your client turns around and says: ‘Everything I’ve told you is hogwash,’ then if they plead guilty it’s OK but I’ve had to walk away from cases where they to continue to plead not guilty. If you’re professionally embarrassed, you can’t go on no matter how much it hurts your pocket.
You need to open your ears before you open your mouth to advise your client.
Monty Raphael QC is special counsel at Peters & Peters
tom.moore@legalease.co.uk