What happened was that some members of Harlow’s spot USD/CHF team were found to be cashing points – as a result, four or five of them got turfed out of the City. What shocked the market was not the fact that they were running points – virtually every broker at the time did that, and it was a big help to liquidity – but that they were cashing them though a bank in Switzerland.
One of them, Barry Wiseman, who was number two on the desk, has just lost a case taken out by Garban Harlow Ueda Ltd, which is now part of Icap. As a result, £600,000 has been repatriated. I haven’t been able to get hold of the court transcript yet and I would imagine that proving whose money it was must have been extremely difficult. I reckon some of it was probably mine, or rather Midland Bank’s – when I tried to trade USD/CHF I was strangely even wrong when I was right.