Te corridors of power ...
Strange how court cases come along like buses. First Nick Leeson makes an appearance, with Deloitte & Touche receiving a rap on the knuckles over Barings, then Peter Young takes the stage.
Young, readers may recall, was a fund manager with Deutsche Morgan Grenfell at around the time that Leeson was digging himself into a hole in Singapore.
These days, Young is better remembered for turning up in court dressed as a woman and asking to be addressed as Elizabeth. Press reports refer to Young as ‘a 6ft bespectacled transsexual City fund manager’.
Young faced fraud charges over multi-million pound losses at Deutsche Morgan Grenfell, but a jury decided that he was unfit to stand trial.
They heard evidence of attempted self-surgery of the sort that cannot be described in a respectable financial journal.
Specimen charges were recently put to a jury at the Old Bailey in a ‘trial of the facts’. This ended with a verdict of ‘guilty’: the jury agreed that Young had cleverly used warrants to fleece Deutsche Morgan Grenfell of millions of pounds, siphoning the money away into a bank account in Jersey.
Young will not go to prison, but faces either a hospitalisation order or guardianship order. He is reportedly living with his brother in Surrey.
Ernest Saunders, jailed for his role in the Guinness Affair, was released early from prison after a doctor diagnosed pre-senile dementia. In tests, he had difficulty walking and was unable to repeat three numbers backwards.
Saunders later made a seemingly miraculous recovery, although he has always insisted that his condition was misdiagnosed. There appears to be no such doubt in the case of Peter Young.
- aJon Ashworth, business features editor at The Times.