2025ii4, Tuesday: Fruit.

We often think of the roads less travelled in our lives. More often than we might think, that phrase should end with the word "yet" - my becoming a barrister in my 40s is testament to that. (And something I, too, often overlook.)

But still, sometimes doors do close. And it's just as good to acknowledge that, and move on.

One such door closed for me in 2011, when I left the Financial Services Authority. There were a lot of reasons for leaving. Some of it was firmly economic: a voluntary pay freeze was biting, and I had a family to feed. But just as with the BBC four years earlier, a big part was frustration with what I saw as unnecessary, even pusillanimous, barriers in the way of doing the job in the way I believed the common good required.

The last straw on that front, I think, arose from a project I'd been engaged in pretty much since I wangled a transfer out of policy work (which I found I loathed within about 48 hours of taking a job in the Financial Crime Policy Unit) and into intelligence. On that first day, or soon afterwards, my boss - the fabulous Denzil Slade - dumped a couple of file boxes on my desk. Inside were piles of dusty papers (this was 2008, after all) concerning a man he'd been interested in for years. My job, he said, was to find an "in": a way of finally nailing him.

I won't name the guy, or identify him too closely. Defamation is a thing, after all. Suffice it to say that he had left the UK in the 90s narrowly ahead of tax and revenue prosecutions, having already sliced and diced a pension fund and ripped a fair few people off. The quality of the man is perhaps best expressed by the fact that even before 9/11 he was persona non grata, financial services-wise, in both Switzerland and the Caymans.

And now here he was, interested in worming his way into the UK's regulated financial sector.

A problem, Denzil said. And of course he was right.

Over the next couple of years, whenever I had time (and whenever contacts with other organisations produced new - to us at least - information on which to build a picture), I searched for a handle. In around 2010, things got more urgent: Mr X was trying to take control of a stockbroker, one which already had a somewhat cloudy reputation. And we wanted to stop him.

And then there it was. The opportunity we'd been looking for. In black and white. Not even in confidential material, but right out there in open source. Mr X had - for reasons best known to himself - been increasing and decreasing his stake in the stockbroker. Up to 30%. Down to 5. Back up to 25. Down again to 9.

Who cares, right? Sounds trivial. But section 178 of the Financial Services and Markets Act 2000 - the elephantine bit of statute which serves as the UK's regulatory bible - makes it mandatory for each of these "changes in control", as they're termed, to be notified to the FSA. (Then; now the FCA. The rules still exist.) And section 191F makes it an offence to fail to do so.

A strict liability offence. Like not paying your car tax. No excuses. No "oops, I forgot".

So I, and several like-minded investigators in Enforcement, proposed this. We could prosecute Mr X. He had no defence. And with a criminal conviction on his record, we'd have a decent stab at keeping him out of the sector - and protecting all the future people he'd probably rip off just that little bit better.

And we were told, firmly: Nope. We don't do that.

I was dumbfounded (and I wasn't alone). We had the tool. Statute gave it to us. It was there to be used. But "not invented here" (or at least "not tried here") meant we weren't allowed to pick it up. Even though it had been used before - in 2009, to gain a conviction which was then deployed to find the offender not fit and proper to own a regulated business and thus shut him out of the sector. (The latter's attempt to resist that being firmly and finally struck out in late 2010.) And again in 2010, just months before these conversations.

It made no sense to me. To any of us. I've no idea, to this day, why the reluctance was there.

I started looking for work within weeks. Within a year, I was gone.

Why do I retell this ancient history?

I've been reminded of it by a series of excellent pieces by Dan Neidle, of Tax Policy Associates. You can find examples here, here, here and here. They're quick reads, and well worth your time.

They give examples of companies registered in the UK and - on this I have to agree with Dan - clearly designed to rip people off. Sometimes for years. And yet nothing appears to be done about them.

It's infuriating for Dan. Certainly is for me. Should be for you, too.

Yes, I know. Companies House has been a sink of crap firms, formed for nefarious purposes, for years. And supposedly, certainly over the past couple of years, it's meant to be pulling its socks up.

But as Dan points out, there's things that can be done. Fake companies rarely file accounts - or file fraudulent ones. Failing to follow the rules on the filing of audited accounts properly incurs civil penalties for directors; repeated ones. Failure to file them at all is a criminal offence: again, one of strict liability. And making filings full of porkies is an offence as well.

And this has been the case for years. Almost two decades, in fact, since they arise from the Companies Act 2006.

Again, the tools are there. Again, someone just has to use them.

I don't know how many of these tools are lying around on the statute books, barely used and gathering dust.

I suspect there are loads of them. Most of them strict liability offences. No mens rea to prove. Just the facts.

It's low-hanging fruit for regulators, investigators and prosecutors - fruit worth grabbing, since it would discourage the burgeoning ranks of fraudsters from grabbing their own low-hanging fruit.

Not stop them altogether, of course. But it strikes me that this kind of offence is on the statute books as a means (objectively speaking; no idea if this is the thought-out intent) of setting up guardrails. Mechanisms to enforce basic regulatory requirements in areas which are easy, factually, to check and where a failure in control opens the door to easy pickings for those who flout those controls to evil ends.

Mostly designed, too, in analogue days - yet in these times, as Dan and his colleagues show, identifying malfeasants in bulk isn't that difficult. And in principle, enforcing them en masse wouldn't be difficult. You could even - perhaps - use something akin to the much–maligned (and rightly so!) Single Justice Procedure to handle it. Given that doing something like this would otherwise probably break the already-groaning criminal justice.

Why, frankly, the hell not?

There's a coda to the story of Mr X.

A couple of years after I walked out of the FSA, he did something that put him squarely on (by then) FCA management's radar. Again, I won't go into specifics - but it was a doozy.

So (according to an old colleague who was a fly on the relevant wall), a meeting of the high and mighty was convened. Something, they said, Must Be Done.

What do we know of Mr X, they asked. My intelligence reports and submissions were perused. And someone thought it would be sensible to get the author in to talk about Mr X. Sorry, said someone; he's left. When, came the question.

And then - so my source claims - someone mentioned the frustrations surrounding the change in control decision. A bit of a tumbleweed moment, apparently.

And then someone changed the subject.