The Guinness scandal was a major British securities fraud case in the 1980s. Four businessmen, known as the Guinness Four, were accused of manipulating the share price of Guinness and assisting a takeover bid of the company. Persian Jewish businessman, Lord David Alliance, wrote in his book, A Bazaare Life, the Autobiography of David Alliance, that he could have been number 5, in addition to the Guinness Four, since he nearly invested in Guinness, but backed out.
Lord Alliance thinks that anti-semitism was behind the scandal, and pointed out, according to TheJC.com, that before the scandal broke, a Conservative minister told a fundraiser, “We are going to get the Jews.” Three out of the four convicted were Jewish, Lord Alliance points out, and the one gentile, Ernest Saunders, had a half-Jewish father. There were charges just as damning, according to Lord Alliance, against Lord Spens and other “bluebloods … who were happy to take the profits when times were good, and let the Jews go to jail for them when things had turned sour.”
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Lord Alliance hasn’t been the first to point out something was fishy or downright unfair about the trial of the Guinness Four. The European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg found that Ernest Saunders, Jack Lyons, Anthony Parnes, and Gerald Ronson were found to have had their human rights violated by improper use of statements. Lord Mandelson, who wrote a forward for Lord Alliance’s book, said a public inquiry of the Guinness scandal should be made. Lord Alliance told JC.com that a commission should “look at this black episode in Britain’s financial history, that to this day rankles in my community.”
