Click here for the full story of the NatWest Three

Having spent two years fighting extradition to the United States it seems ironic that the so-called NatWest Three ended up engaging in the peculiarly American legal practice of plea-bargaining, admitting guilt to a lesser charge in return for a lighter prison sentence.

But far from drawing a line under the case, which has been rumbling along for more than five years, yesterday’s agreement is likely to intensify the debate surrounding their highly contentious extradition.

The location for the trial of the NatWest Three has been hotly contested ever since September 2002, when David Bermingham, Gary Mulgrew and Giles Darby were indicted by a grand jury in Houston, Texas.

The seven charges each faced carried a maximum sentence of 35 years and centred on an allegedly fraudulent deal that they did with an Enron off-balance sheet entity in 2000, while working for the capital markets arm of NatWest. The prosecution contended that they collectively pocketed $7.3 million in illicit gains from the deal, through which they allegedly defrauded NatWest and aided Enron’s demise, although the trio had always strenuously denied all allegations.

American lawyers pushed for a trial in Texas on the basis of a treaty signed in 2003 by David Blunkett that for the first time enabled the extradition without prima facie evidence of anyone from Britain sought by the US authorities. They argued that since the trio had played a role in the web of financial fraud that in 2001 sunk Enron, the Texas-based energy trader, it was in America’s interest to try them in the country.

The biggest loser in the Enron deal was undoubtedly NatWest, a UK bank, and the trio awaiting trial were all British. However, since neither the Crown Prosecution Service, the Serious Fraud Office or the Financial Services Authority sought to prosecute them, America’s request to try them seemed fair enough.

What really raised the hackles of opponents of the extradition was the fact that the treaty, which was negotiated without parliamentary scrutiny after the September 11 attacks and designed to clamp down on terrorists, was not reciprocal.

Initially, America failed to ratify it for application to US citizens, meaning that Briton continued to need significant evidence to justify extraditing an American to the UK. However, America has since ratified the treaty at its end.

There were also concerns that any jury in Houston, Texas, would not look kindly on wealthy bankers who were alleged to have profited in any way from the demise of Enron, which deprived its staff of billions of dollars in pensions payouts when it melted down under its multi-billion dollar fraud.

So when a judge ruled in favour of their extradition in September 2004 the decision was met with a chorus of disapproval by businesses, politicians and media groups who said that the British government had sold them down the river. Philip Green, the retail entrepreneur, Richard Lambert, director general of the CBI, Archie Norman, the former head of Asda, Jon Moulton, the venture capitalist, were among the prominent business figures who came out against the decision. David Davies, the shadow Home Secretary, also joined the so-called Fair Trials for Business Campaign, which lobbied the government to block the extradition, as the NatWest Three’s plight became a fully-fledged cause celebre.

The chief complaint of business was that a law designed to ensnare terrorist suspects was instead hitting corporate Britain. By June of this year, only five of the 60 US extradition requests made to the UK concerned suspected acts of terrorism.

But many protestors were more concerned with legal principles. Shami Chakrabarti, head of Liberty, was among the human rights campaigners who described the extradition as "unjust", given Houston’s tie to the Enron meltdown. More importantly, she argued that the principle of extradition without prima facie evidence was "nothing short of a disgrace".

Not that any of the protests made any difference. The NatWest Three’s appeal against extradition was rejected three times over the following two years; by the High Court in June 2006, and by the House of Lords and by the European Court of Human Rights, both in June 2006.

After much protest, the NatWest Three were eventually extradited on July 13, 2006, where they have stayed on bail ever since.

In some ways, the protests over the extradition provided an opportunity for Briton’s to vent their anger of America’s global dominance and heavy handed approach to terrorism.

But however unreasonable the non-reciprocal nature of the 2003 Extradition Act – and its elimination of the prima facie evidence requirement - might be, it is essentially a sideshow to the NatWest Three case.

In the absence of any action from a UK entity and given the alleged role, however small, that the three played in Enron’s demise, a case can certainly be made for a US trial.

The unsatisfactory part comes in the suspects’ practice of plea bargaining, which is not permitted in the UK and has long been criticised on the basis that its close relationship with rewards, threats and coercion potentially endangers the correct legal outcome.

Inevitably, in the wake of this plea bargain, many will be asking whether the NatWest Three are getting off with a lighter sentence than they deserve in return for ensuring a hasty conviction? Or whether they are innocents, being forced to admit guilt because they are so scared of being wrongly convicted by a biased jury that they are willing to cut their losses and falsely admit guilt? Either way, debate is likely to rumble on for some time yet.

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