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Business of the House
3.30 pm
The Lord President of the Council and Leader of the House of Commons (Mr. Tony Newton): I should like to make a short business statement. The business for tomorrow-- [Interruption.]
Madam Speaker: Order. This is a most important statement, which the House should pay attention to. Would those Members who are leaving please do so quietly, because the remainder of us want to hear what it is all about?
Mr. Newton: The business for tomorrow will now be as follows: Until 2.30 pm, there will be debates on the motion for the Adjournment of the House.
For three hours, there will be a debate on the First Report of the Select Committee on Standards in Public Life.
Consideration of Lords amendments to the Children (Scotland) Bill. That will be followed by a debate on Bosnia on a motion for the Adjournment of the House, for a further three hours.
Mrs. Ann Taylor (Dewsbury): May I thank the Leader of the House for that statement, and say that we recognise the need for a debate on Bosnia in the present circumstances? Obviously, he is right to make arrangements for the House to discuss that specific matter in a specific debate, rather than using the Wednesday morning debate for that purpose. We shall also understand if the Prime Minister and the Leader of the House feel it necessary to recall Parliament in the recess, given the speed with which events may move.
May I ask the Leader of the House whether he can clarify the position of the Foreign Secretary, who was here a few moments ago for Question Time? I understand that the Foreign Secretary is going to Washington shortly. Surely it would be possible for him to delay that visit so that he can participate in that debate tomorrow, and surely it will be right for him to do so.
Finally, I do not want to quibble with the statement that the right hon. Gentleman has just made, but, in view of the fanfare last week when the Prime Minister launched his sports policy, may we ask whether that debate will be rearranged--or will sport be put back on the back burner?
Mr. Newton: I welcome the hon. Lady's generally constructive and supportive remarks. I shall return to her last point in a moment. As far as the debate on Bosnia is concerned, my right hon. and learned Friend the Foreign Secretary is going to Washington, as my right hon. Friend the Prime Minister said, and I believe that most people in the House will regard it as important that he should play his full part in the international discussions that need to be associated with effective action in Bosnia. The debate in the House will be taken on behalf of the Government by my right hon. Friend the Secretary of State for Defence and my hon. Friend the Minister of State, Foreign and Commonwealth Office, the hon. Member for Upminster (Sir N. Bonsor).
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There is, of course, no suggestion of putting sport on the back burner. I believe that it will be universally agreed that Bosnia must come ahead of it tomorrow, but of course I shall make every effort to provide time for a debate on sport in the spillover.Mr. Archy Kirkwood (Roxburgh and Berwickshire): I am happy to endorse the change in the business for tomorrow; it is absolutely right and proper that the House should have an opportunity to discuss the Bosnian situation before the summer recess. Will the Leader of the House give an assurance that it will not be a substitute for a recall of Parliament, if the circumstances dictate that Parliament should be recalled?
Secondly, I hope that I can assist the right hon. Gentleman by assuring him --I think that I speak for most hon. Members from Scotland--that the Lords amendments to the Children (Scotland) Bill are largely uncontentious and should be taken more or less formally to enable the House to go straight to the debate on Bosnia, as is right and proper in the circumstances.
Mr. Newton: On the Children (Scotland) Bill, I should make it clear that that business was inserted following representations from both sides of the House, and on the clear understanding that the amendments are uncontentious and should pass through the House without difficulty. The business will not impede the debate on Bosnia. I am grateful for the hon. Gentleman's affirmation of that fact on behalf of the Liberal Democrats.
On the hon. Gentleman's first point, yes, I think that I have shown--by this statement and various other changes that I have made, including the recall of Parliament during the short recess--that the Prime Minister and I are always willing to make appropriate arrangements as circumstances necessitate.
Mr. Nigel Spearing (Newham, South): Why did not the Leader of the House make it clear in his statement that the important debate on Bosnia was, in effect, replacing the planned debate on sport? Does he recall that, on Friday at 9.30 am, I said that, despite the presence of the Minister responsible for sport on the Front Bench, there was to be no statement in the House at 11 am, although one was made at Millwall football ground? Does not the right hon. Gentleman agree that he could perfectly easily move the motion tomorrow at 10 o'clock to suspend the rule, so that we could have a debate on sport for two or three hours? If he does not do that, he might well be accused of putting sport on the back burner.
Mr. Newton: I have already said something on that subject to the hon. Member for Dewsbury (Mrs. Taylor), and it would be a ridiculous charge if pressed. I also think that it would be ridiculous for anyone to think anything other than that, in today's circumstances, it is more appropriate to debate Bosnia tomorrow.
Mr. John Marshall (Hendon, South): While I recognise the need to replace the debate on sport, does my right hon. Friend accept that a sum of £100 million for a sports academy gives the lie to those who say that the Government are putting sport on the back burner?
Mr. Newton: My hon. Friend is as helpful to me from below the Gangway as he used to be from above it.
Mr. Tony Banks (Newham, North-West): Why can we not have the debate on Bosnia on an Executive motion
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from the Government, so that we can vote at the end of it and the will of the House can be made known to the country at large? If the Prime Minister has his summit meeting on Friday, would it not be appropriate to suspend the Adjournment of the House for the summer recess until next week?Mr. Newton: I do not think it would, especially given what I have already said by implication to the hon. Member for Dewsbury, and more directly to the hon. Member for Roxburgh and Berwickshire (Mr. Kirkwood), about our willingness to make appropriate arrangements--for example, for a recall--should that prove necessary.
Mr. Andrew Faulds (Warley, East): Is the right hon. Gentleman aware that his assurance about a recall of the House was perhaps not quite as categoric as it should have been? May we have an absolute assurance that, if this Government of supine gentlemen plan a retreat from Bosnia, in the scuttle they intend, the House has a chance to debate the matter before it is done?
Mr. Newton: I shall try to keep my tone down, despite the way in which the hon. Gentleman raised--
Madam Speaker: Order. The hon. Member for Warley, East (Mr. Faulds) should keep his temper--nobody in the House wants to hear it.
Mr. Newton: I shall say as calmly as I can to the hon. Gentleman that, if we felt that Bosnia did not matter, we would not have recalled Parliament during the recent short recess precisely because of an important development that needed to be debated.
Mrs. Maria Fyfe (Glasgow, Maryhill): May I thank the Leader of the House for responding to a request to bring forward the Children (Scotland) Bill tomorrow, which is much appreciated by all those involved in Scotland? Will he tell us now that all possible steps will be taken to ensure that that legislation is implemented as quickly as possible?
Mr. Newton: That is the purpose of inserting the legislation in tomorrow's business, and I am grateful to everyone who has co-operated in the process, including the hon. Lady.
Mr. Chris Mullin (Sunderland, South): Why are the Government attempting to push through the draft Broadcasting (Restrictions on the Holding of Licences) (Amendment) Order 1995 on the nod this afternoon, when it was rejected in Committee only last week?
Madam Speaker: Order. The hon. Gentleman is quite out of order. We are concerned only with the very narrow business statement about tomorrow's change of business. As I am sure there are no more questions about that, we will move on to the statement from the Chancellor of the Exchequer.
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Barings
3.39 pm
The Chancellor of the Exchequer (Mr. Kenneth Clarke): With permission, Madam Speaker, I should like to make a statement about the Board of Banking Supervision's inquiry into the collapse of Barings. I set up the inquiry in my statement to the House on 27 February and I have recently received the board's report from the Bank of England.
Since receiving the report, I have had to consider very carefully the legal considerations relevant to publication. I am sure that it is right for Parliament to have the report in all its detail, so that its consideration of the Board of Banking Supervision's conclusions and the lessons to be learned can be properly informed.
I have concluded that the balance of the public interest lies firmly in favour of publishing the full report. The report is being published today without any deletions, and copies are available from the Vote Office. I am very grateful to the board and to the investigating team for the huge effort they have put into compiling the report. They have done a thorough and a speedy job.
The report's main findings are: the losses were incurred by unauthorised and concealed trading activities within Barings Futures Singapore; the true position was not noticed earlier because of serious failures of controls and managerial confusion within the Barings group; and the true position had not been detected prior to the collapse by the external auditors, supervisors or regulators of Barings.
The Board of Banking Supervision was not able to gain access to all the information that it would have liked. In particular, it was unable to determine Nick Leeson's motives or whether he was acting alone, because of serious difficulties in obtaining information from Singapore. The obstacles were, I understand, legal ones, and there were some problems in providing the Singapore investigators with all the information that they, in turn, sought from London.
However, it was clearly important to ensure as complete an exchange of information as possible, and I wrote twice to the Finance Minister in Singapore seeking his help in obtaining the co-operation of the authorities there. It is regrettable that serious legal obstacles remained that prevented all the relevant documents from being provided to our board.
Leeson himself was invited to co-operate with the inquiry, but he declined to do so. Through his solicitors, he has been informed of the conclusions that the board has reached about his part in the collapse. His solicitors wrote to the board on 22 June saying that the report's conclusions were inaccurate in various respects, but they did not provide any further details of his response. The report describes how the concealment of the true nature of dealings in Singapore and the build-up of losses from unauthorised trading began almost as soon as Nick Leeson joined Barings Futures Singapore as general manager and head trader in 1992. By the end of 1993, the cumulative loss was more than £20 million and, by the end of 1994, it was more than £200 million. Losses then leaped spectacularly in the first few weeks of 1995, and, after the collapse on 26 February, the cumulative loss was a staggering £827 million.
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Leeson successfully sought to conceal those huge losses throughout by a complex and systematic process of deception and false reporting. Such a massive unauthorised position could not have been established if there had been an effective system of management, financial and operating controls within Barings. The report details a great number of failings, and I shall give the House some examples.The money required to fund the losses came primarily from London. It was advanced to Singapore with no independent check on the validity of the requests, or any attempt to reconcile them to any known trading position. If management in London had sought to examine the information from Singapore to support the requests for funds, they should have discovered that the information that they were being given was meaningless.
Barings management in London seem generally to have believed that the money being sent to Singapore was being lent to clients to facilitate their trading. However, the credit aspects of these advances were never formally reviewed or considered by the credit committee.
Barings management did not question why they were apparently lending more than £300 million to clients to trade when they had collateral of only about £31 million from clients for those trades. The management of Barings did not question the extraordinarily high levels of apparent profitability of supposed arbitrage dealings in Singapore, which were regarded as being without risk.
In the view of the Board of Banking Supervision, those profits should have been viewed as abnormal and questionable, and the extraordinary profitability reported in 1994 should have attracted the close and thorough attention of the management long before the collapse.
Despite Leeson's efforts at concealment, some information on the account that he used to hide his losses was available to London, but it was never analysed. No one in Barings accepted responsibility for Leeson's activities for the whole of 1994. His deception was made easier as he was not only a trader but was in charge of the so-called back office, which processed the paperwork associated with trading. In 1994, Barings' internal auditors recommended that, as a trader, he should not have this responsibility for the back office. Barings failed to implement that recommendation.
There were also serious and consistent failures and errors in the bank's exposure reports to the Bank of England and in other reports to the Securities and Futures Authority, which made it less likely that they would be alerted to evidence of a problem.
Coopers and Lybrand Singapore was the auditor for Barings Futures Singapore for 1994. In preparing these accounts, the auditor expressed the view that the controls of Barings Futures Singapore were satisfactory. This conclusion is not easy to reconcile with the lack of segregation of duties within the Singapore subsidiary which I have just described.
For both 1993 and 1994, the auditor of the London operations was Coopers and Lybrand London. The report also raises doubts over the effectiveness of its testing of Barings' internal controls. The board considers that more thorough tests would have been likely to reveal the inadequate support for the funding requests from Singapore, but the 1994 audit had not been fully
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completed, and it will never be known whether Coopers would have raised with the management the important issues which had apparently not been identified or addressed by the time of the collapse. The independent members of the Board of Banking Supervision were separately asked by me to review the role of the United Kingdom regulators, particularly the Bank of England, in the events leading to the collapse. The board was assisted in this inquiry by a team of accountants, lawyers and derivatives experts, all drawn from outside the Bank of England.The board does not consider that the events leading up to the collapse point to the need for any fundamental change to the framework of regulation in the United Kingdom; but there is, it concludes, a need for improvements in the implementation of existing arrangements. [ Laughter. ] The arrangements are only as good as the people who carry them out.
The board considers that the Bank of England reasonably placed reliance on local regulators of the overseas operations, and was also entitled to place reliance on the explanations of the management for the profitability of these operations, and on the other information provided by Barings. Although the regulatory reports from Barings to regulators did contain information that was relevant to the collapse, they did not contain material information which could have alerted the regulators to the existence of the unauthorised positions that had been taken.
The board identified a number of shortcomings in implementation by the Bank of England. It considers that an error of judgment was made in 1993, in giving Barings Brothers and Company an "informal concession" in relation to the normal obligation of a bank to notify in advance exposures representing more than 25 per cent. of its capital base. The time taken by the Bank of England to address the policy issues involved resulted in what the board judged to be an unacceptable delay of almost two years in reimposing the 25 per cent. limit. The Board of Banking Supervision was unable to determine whether the delay on the part of the Bank of England in imposing that limit was a contributing factor in Barings' collapse.
The board also considers that the Bank of England displayed a lack of rigour in the analysis leading to the decision to permit Barings Securities Ltd. and Barings Brothers to be supervised on a joint, or so-called solo consolidation, basis, and in failing to review the decision. Solo consolidation of the two companies need not have resulted in a reduction in control over the advance of funds to the Singapore subsidiary, but in the case of Barings that was the practical effect.
The report draws lessons for the management of banks such as Barings, and for regulators and auditors. The Bank of England has accepted all the recommendations relevant to it, and I am placing copies of the Bank's detailed response in the Library of the House. The only other regulator for which the Board of Banking Supervision draws lessons is the Securities and Futures Authority, which will respond once it has studied the report.
The collapse of the Barings group was clearly a very serious matter, and caused great damage to the reputation of the City of London. It has led to loss for a number of investors in Barings. However, the takeover by ING has stabilised the group, and averted the prospect of far greater loss. Nothing has happened since my earlier
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statement, and there is nothing in the report, to make me doubt my view that it would have been wrong to use public funds to rescue Barings.Finally, I should like to remind the House of an important point. No regulatory system can provide a 100 per cent. guarantee against a bank failure, especially where there is a deliberate intention on the part of individual traders to conceal or deceive, combined with inadequate management controls. In cases such as this, it is important that lessons are learned quickly and promulgated widely, so that all parties, including the management of other financial institutions, can learn from the unfortunate example.
The speed and openness of the process of inquiry is the best way to give confidence to the public and to the City. The Bank of England has already responded positively to the report. It is essential that the management of all financial firms do the same.
Mr. Gordon Brown (Dunfermline, East): We now know from today's 350- page report that the entire capital of Britain's oldest merchant bank was transferred out of the country against the law, without any supervisor or regulator either noticing or finding out.
We now know also from the exposure in the pages of the report that, along the line, Barings' managers, directors, accountants and regulators were also subject to error. We now know also--an astonishing admission from the Bank of England in the report--that there were no guidelines or systems in place to deal with the problem.
Does not the 350-page report reveal not just the blame that must attach to Mr. Leeson, who gambled away a bank and who awaits trial in Singapore, but the fact that the system of regulation designed to detect and check irregularities is now also on trial? Is it really sufficient for the Chancellor, in a statement virtually devoid of significant recommendations for policy change, to tell us that all that is needed is a new memorandum of understanding with the Securities and Futures Authority and a better understanding by the Bank of England of non-banking business and the management structure of banks--all of which we should have expected to have been automatically in place years ago? We have had a statement from the Chancellor that suggests the need rather than answers the case for reform.
Given that the report has discovered not just serious failures of controls and managerial confusion in Barings, but that warnings were ignored from 1992 onwards, why were such failings not identified or dealt with by the regulatory authorities in advance of the collapse? There is no answer to that in the report we have.
Will action be taken against the management of Barings under the Banking Act? Do we have an assurance that they will not be allowed to take senior management positions in other banks, except under the most stringent controls? Will the Chancellor join me in criticising those officials still in post whose management has left pensioners without their savings, and who have disgracefully insisted on taking their share of £95 million in bonuses? That will cause considerable public anger.
What does the Chancellor have to say in response to Mr. Andrew Crockett of the Bank for International Settlements, who warned in January of the risks arising from banks increasingly using the derivatives trade to generate their biggest profits, and with Barings, as the report says, making its system of remuneration for senior
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executives throughout the bank heavily dependent on profits generated from derivatives? Was not the system itself inherently unstable? Will the Chancellor tell us why no requirements have yet been imposed on other banks to ensure the existence of adequate and greater controls to detect excessive exposure on a daily basis? As for the role of the Bank of England, is it really right for a junior official in the Bank to carry the can? The report reveals that just about everyone in the know in Singapore, including many newspapers--and, indeed, many in London--was aware of the problems of Barings; but not, it seems, the Bank of England, which should have been the first to know, but apparently was the last to be told. Is it not clear that the report has provided a damning indictment of the Bank of England's whole approach to the supervision of the banking system? On page 244, the Bank admits that it relied on an informal network of understanding, and made informal concessions--as the Chancellor said--to a management that it now concedes were shambolic. It was thought reasonable to rely on localregulators--regulators who have refused to co-operate in the investigation.
A statement on page 245 symbolises the whole problem:
"There does not appear to have been any guideline or system in place within the Bank for determining . . . the situation". Does that not illustrate everything that is wrong with the Bank's approach--an excessive reliance on the old boys network--and does it not demonstrate the need for tougher regulatory controls? Can the Chancellor really be satisfied with a concluding statement in the report that says only:
"the Bank should explore ways of increasing its understanding of the non- banking business"?
Why is it only now that the Bank proposes to co-operate with the SFA in a better way, and why does it propose only at this stage "to prepare internal guidelines to assist its staff"?
Is it not symptomatic of the whole culture of complacency that the Governor said only last August that there was no need to worry about the derivatives market, because
"We now have an expert team monitoring derivatives",
getting better all the time? Was it not also over-complacent to dismiss the Americans as "over-excited" by the need for regulation, and to say of derivatives traders such as Barings:
"These people know what they are doing, whether it's at director level or the chaps on the desk"?
These failures reflect not just incompetence, but a flawed structure of regulation. Is it not time to listen to the advice that has come from within London, from the Bank for International Settlements, to learn from the experience of the Securities and Exchange Commission, and to ensure that the regulatory system, nationally and internationally, matches the realities of global trading in the 1990s?
Will the Chancellor now set up a review to consider these matters, and also to consider whether the Bank of England should continue in its regulatory role, or should pass it to a new banking commission? After three significant and embarrassing failures--Johnson Matthey, the Bank of Credit and Commerce International and now Barings--we must do far more than the Chancellor has
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announced today to ensure effective supervision, and, for savers and investors, to ensure that there is far greater confidence in the integrity of our financial system.Mr. Clarke: Like everyone else, the hon. Gentleman will no doubt study the report and reach sensible conclusions in the end. First, let me deal with the Government's role. When Barings collapsed, the Government first took a full part in attempts to sort out the affair that led to ING taking over the bank, and to early fears of substantial losses being minimised. We were not panicked into using public funds to bail out the bank. I then immediately asked the Board of Banking Supervision to exercise its proper function and inquire into the matter, so that the House and the public would know the facts of the case and the lessons to be learned as quickly as possible. We were criticised for acting in that way, but the board has produced a copious report.
As the hon. Gentleman conceded, the report pulls no punches. It describes the facts in considerable detail, and it requires considerable study. Hours of reading are needed to catch up with precisely what went on in Singapore and London, in the bank and elsewhere. The report spares no one from criticism; it has exposed the failures, as far as is possible at this stage, for anyone to read.
The strictures that the hon. Gentleman heaped on Barings management are somewhat understated, compared with those in the report. So far as I am aware, all those responsible in Barings management are no longer with Barings, having left that bank as a result of action taken by the new owners and Barings. Similarly, the man most responsible for the supervision of Barings inside the Bank of England has resigned from that Bank. The attempt to get behind that and to ignore, perhaps, at this stage, on inadequate study, the report's findings on how carefully the trading in London was concealed, and how completely the failure of control inside Barings was concealed, is a mistake.
Having obtained the facts for the House and the lessons to be learned, I now commend the report to the House for study, no doubt, for debate, or for whatever else we wish to do in due course when people wish to consider this matter properly. Meanwhile, open inquiry, full disclosure and a hard- hitting, independent report are the best way of restoring confidence in the Bank of England.
Certainly we need to improve collaboration between supervisors in different countries, a process that has been well advanced by the Basle committee, but this underlines the need to take it further. It is not true that the Singapore authorities flatly refused to co-operate; there was proper reason. The Monetary Authority of Singapore and the Singapore Monetary Exchange are well-regulated bodies, and the reputation of Singapore and the City of London is high in the international arena.
On both sides of this divide, there are legal constraints imposed by the regulatory authorities on the disclosure of information, and that is the only thing that has stood in the way of the full information that will no doubt emerge in due course, when the entire Singapore and London picture is revealed.
There are failings inside the Bank, which is why 17 recommendations are addressed to the Bank and why it has accepted those recommendations and is addressing
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them, but, with the greatest respect, if one has a regulatory system that the board says is fundamentally right as a framework, it is fully effective only if the efficiency of the people operating it is as good as the ingenuity of the people who are trying to conceal information.Frankly, just renaming the whole thing and having a new banking commission in a spirit of, "Something must be done, so let's move a lot of brass plates about and have the same people doing the regulating, but call them a different name and put them in a different institution," is a facile response to such a serious matter.
The hon. Member for Dunfermline, East (Mr. Brown) leaps off into the general question of derivatives, which is an important and serious matter. The report makes it clear that the cause of the collapse in this case was not the nature of the derivatives markets, although it is true that derivatives, because of their gearing, enable big positions to be run up more quickly than could occur in the ordinary futures market.
In that market, and in any international trading of this type, if people are skilful enough in their systematic concealing of the true nature of dealing, and if the people responsible for them, in the bank or outside, are complacent enough not seriously to get beneath it, this sort of thing occurs.
Mr. Clarke: The hon. Gentleman says, "Complacent." That is the criticism in the real world that could be hurled at many of the senior people in Barings and in the Bank of England.
Mr. Clarke: It is all very well having hindsight. I have hindsight. The board has hindsight. I compete with the hon. Gentleman in imposing strictures on all those people who have lost their jobs. Any hon. Member putting himself in their position realises that it never crossed their minds that they might be playing some small part in such a huge and systematic process.
Obviously, however, it is clear that the systems inside financial institutions and inside the Bank of England had to be tightened up to ensure that absolutely no complacency or anything else could allow this sort of thing to slip through in future. That action has been taken because of the prompt, open and effective action of this country's Government in discharging their obligations to the House.
Mr. Tristan Garel-Jones (Watford): Is my right hon. and learned Friend aware that, during his statement, he mentioned the name of my constituent, Mr. Nick Leeson, on about a dozen occasions? Does it not strike my right hon. and learned Friend as odd, to say the very least, as it certainly does both Mr. Leeson's family and most of my constituents, that Mr. Leeson, who is clearly a central figure in this matter, should be sitting in a prison in a member state of the European Union, awaiting extradition to Singapore, when he has made it clear that he is anxious to make a clean breast of this matter in his own country?
Does it not strike my right hon. and learned Friend as surprising, in relation to what I think is a good report that will help to re-establish confidence in the City, that someone who has such a contribution to make should not have been invited to return to this country to make a clean
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breast of his position, and therefore to enhance the sort of inquiries that my right hon. and learned Friend wishes to pursue?Mr. Clarke: I appreciate the fact that my right hon. Friend is speaking on behalf of the legitimate interests of his constituent, which is what he and I are elected to the House to do. However, it is not possible to produce a board report that does not make copious references to Mr. Leeson, given that he was personally responsible for the trading and settlement of transactions that ran up a total of £827 million in losses and broke the bank where he was employed. When it came to publication, I carefully considered Mr. Leeson's position and the public interest. Mr. Leeson must be dealt with by due process of law on whatever charges may be brought against him in whatever jurisdiction, but it seemed to me that the overriding public interest was to restore confidence in the City of London and our regulatory authorities, and to meet the Government's obligations to the House and let the House know as much as we knew, so that it can in due course reach a considered conclusion.
As for Mr. Leeson's possible trials, he was a resident of Singapore, and therefore made himself subject to the laws and jurisdiction of Singapore. If he goes back to Singapore, he will no doubt have a fair trial-- [Hon. Members:-- "Oh."] I am sorry that half the Labour party still thinks that mention of foreigners means that there is no justice to be had. We are dealing with trading in Singapore. I have no doubt that, when considering extradition, the German authorities will consider the nature of the charges against Mr. Leeson, the prospects of a trial there, and, quite properly, German extradition law and whether he should be extradited.
The question whether Mr. Leeson faces charges in this country is a matter for the prosecuting authorities and the Serious Fraud Office, not for Ministers. It is hardly surprising that proceedings are going ahead in Germany, and the British Government can play no part in determining whether Mr. Leeson is extradited from Germany. We cannot repeat the sneers of the Opposition, who seem to think that one should not extradite Brits to foreign countries even when they seem to have been engaged in unauthorised trading activities in Singapore and the concealment of those activities, which resulted in considerable loss for other people.
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