The European Court of Human Rights today refused to halt extradition proceedings against three British bankers wanted in the United States on fraud charges relating to the collapse of energy company Enron.

David Bermingham, Gary Mulgrew and Giles Darby, former executives at Greenwich NatWest, a unit of Royal Bank of Scotland Group PLC, had asked the European court to freeze a British court ruling for their deportation ahead of a fuller appeal.

However, the European court said in a letter to London law firm Jeffrey Green Russell that it saw no immediate cause to overturn the decision of the British courts to send the trio to face trial in the United States.

A court official wrote that it had been decided "in the circumstances, not to indicate to the government of the United Kingdom ... the interim measure you are seeking."

It added that the "remaining issues, namely the merits of the application, will be examined in due course. However ... any such examination of the remaining legal issues will not stop the applicants’ proposed removal."

The Home Office confirmed that arrangements are now underway to extradite the three men by July 17.

The so-called NatWest Three have been fighting against their extradition since a High Court ruling in February. They ran out of British avenues of appeal last week when the House of Lords ruled that it would not hear the case.

The three men have consistently argued that most of the alleged offences took place in Britain and that any trial should be held under British jurisdiction. They claimed that being forced to stand trial in Enron’s home state of Texas would be unjust and incompatible with European human rights law.

The final appeal, however, was a challenge against the legitimacy of the controversial fast-track extradition treaty between the US and the UK.

Under the terms of the 2003 deal designed to combat terrorism, the US can extradite suspects from the UK without prima facie evidence that a crime has been committed. It has been attacked by business and human rights groups, including Liberty, which claim that the act has been used by the US to target white-collar crime.

There is also an argument that while the UK has ratified the agreement, the US has yet to do so: the agreement only operates one-way and is, according to critics, technically unlawful.

Mark Spragg, solicitor for the three men, said that he was now transferring legal files to the court in Houston for a trial "which could, and should, take place in the UK."

"We have now done everything possible to establish the rights of three UK citizens to be investigated and, if appropriate, prosecuted in the UK but all we have established is that UK citizens have no such rights against an extradition request made by the US," he said.

The trio, all British citizens, were charged in the United States in 2002 with defrauding National Westminster Bank of $7.3 million (£4 million). Each face seven counts of wire fraud. The charge, a US term for fraud aggravated by the use of electronic communication, carries a sentence of 30 years in prison or a $1million fine.

The trio allegedly advised NatWest in 2000 to sell part of an Enron business it owned for less than the stake was worth, in a scheme allegedly devised with Andrew Fastow, former finance chief of the collapsed energy trader Enron Corp., and his colleague, managing director Michael Kopper.

The three men then left NatWest, bought into the firm themselves and sold it off for a much higher fee, each pocketing about $2.6 million in the process, according to prosecutors.

Enron filed for bankruptcy in 2001 after revealing that it inflated its profits and filed false accounts to hide debts.

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