Top lawyer takes on Guinness four

The Attorney General, Lord Goldsmith QC, is to take charge of defending the Serious Fraud Office when the Guinness four take their appeal against their convictions to the House of Lords later this year.

The decision by the most senior legal officer in the country indicates how importantly the legal establishment is taking the fight against the four businessmen, who were convicted of illegally rigging the stock market in a case that ended in 1990.

The four – Ernest Saunders, Jack Lyons, Anthony Parnes and Gerald Ronson – were convicted after an investigation by the Department of Trade & Industry and the SFO into share price manipulation during Guinness's successful bid for Distillers in 1986.

A second trail was abandoned when one of the defendants – former Morgan Grenfell merchant banker Roger Seelig – was found to be mentally unfit to face trial.

Three of the four found guilty – Saunders, Parnes and Ronson – went to jail, while Lyons was fined £3m and was subsequently stripped of his knighthood.

The four launched an unsuccessful attempt to have their convictions quashed in the Court of Appeal last year. Represented by Michael Beloff QC, they raised a number of issues about the fairness of the investigation, particularly the fact that they had no right to silence when being interviewed by the DTI and that these interviews were later used to incriminate them.

This practice was later found to be in contravention of the Human Rights Act, though this became law after the Guinness trial and the House of Lords ruled, in a separate case, that the Act could not be applied retrospectively.

In the Appeal hearing, Mr Beloff also claimed the police had evidence that a member of the original jury was open to accepting a bribe in order to secure a "not guilty" verdict, but did not disclose this.

The decision by Lord Goldsmith to take charge of the case comes despite the success of Victor Temple QC, who acted for the SFO in last year's appeal hearing.

Lord Goldsmith's office gave no reason for why he was taking on the case, although he has taken on a number of high-profile cases for the Crown and will be appearing in the Lords next week to defend the Government's anti-terrorism legislation.

As the country's most senior law officer, Lord Goldsmith has ministerial responsibility for the SFO.