It’s hard to imagine that the federal government could have sent worse signals to foreign investors in US markets and businesses than the ones that it sent over the past week.
First, there was the latest news about the NatWest Three, the three UK bankers who had the misfortune of making an investment in one of Enron’s special purpose entities controlled by former Enron CFO Andrew Fastow and his right-hand man in crime, Michael Kopper. Remarkably, the only reason that the NatWest Three were spared from the Enron Task Force demanding their incarceration in Houston’s downtown Federal Detention Center pending their trial was the intervention of UK Prime Minister Tony Blair, who assured an angered British Parliament a week ago that the bankers would be released on bail.
Nevertheless, even Blair’s intervention didn’t stop the Task Force from demanding that the bankers remain in the US pending their trial (despite the fact that the three offered to waive extradition for trial) and that the three friends live apart and not talk to each other about their case unless their counsel is present. Unbelievably, the federal magistrate who adjudicated the bankers’ bail motion accepted the Task Force’s ludicrous “live seperately” and “no-talk” demands, which means that three UK friends in a foreign land must live alone and cannot talk freely with each other while preparing their joint defense in an extraordinarily unfriendly venue. In the meantime, their only known accusers — admitted felons and liars Fastow and Kopper — have no such restriction in hobnobbing with each other and continue to live comfortably in their expensive Houston homes.

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