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The Guinness share-trading fraud was a British business scandal of the 1980s. It involved the manipulation of the stock market to inflate the price of Guinness shares to thereby assist Guinness's £4 billion takeover bid for the Scottish drinks company Distillers. Four businessmen were convicted of criminal offences for taking part in the manipulation. The European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg later found that their trial violated the defendants' human rights by making improper use of statements.〔Case of I.J.L. and Others v. The United Kingdom (Judgement of the Court, 19 September 2000 )〕 The scandal was discovered in testimony given by the US stock trader Ivan Boesky as part of a plea bargain. Ernest Saunders, Gerald Ronson, Jack Lyons and Anthony Parnes, the so-called "Guinness four", were charged, paid large fines and with the exception of Lyons, who was suffering from ill-health, served prison sentences later reduced on appeal.〔("The best-known stock market scandal in Britain"; Daily Telegraph on-line, seen June 2011 )〕 ==Crime== The defendants bought shares in Guinness plc to, by supporting its share price, enable Guinness to take over Distillers, a much larger company. The Distillers board favoured Guinness as partners and were facing a hostile bid by Argyll. The Guinness executives guaranteed without limit the defendants' losses if the value of their Guinness shares dropped; this gave the defendants an unfair advantage in what should be a fair market. The prosecution relied on a new law; the defendants claimed that supporting a share price with a guarantee was an unusual but longstanding market practice. Saunders had invested US$100 million with an American arbitrage expert, Ivan Boesky, to invest in shares; it was said that the fee for managing this amount was Boesky's reward for supporting the Guinness share price. Boesky was charged in New York on another matter and mentioned this payment under questioning. This information was passed on to the DTI corporate inspectorate in London, leading to an investigation in which Saunders' other secret share price support arrangements were unveiled. It also emerged that Saunders' arrangements had not been revealed to, nor sanctioned by, the Guinness board. Saunders was said to have misdescribed this sum in Guinness's accounts, though some believed that it was properly an off-balance sheet item. At that time, $100 million was a very large percentage of Guinness's annual profits. In total, Guinness paid $38 million to 11 companies in at least six countries to buy $300 million of Guinness stock. Half of the stock was bought by Bank Leu. Saunders had formerly been a senior executive at the Swiss firm Nestlé. When the Distillers takeover was completed, Guinness plc also paid a £5.2 million success fee to a Guinness director, American lawyer Tom Ward, but this was paid in such a way that it was alleged that Saunders had himself been secretly paid much of the fee outside Britain by Ward. The matter was examined in ''Guinness plc v Saunders'', a UK company law case distinct from the criminal cases, and Ward was ordered to return the fee to Guinness plc. 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア（Wikipedia）』 ■ウィキペディアで「Guinness share-trading fraud」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
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