(Enron) 'NatWest 3' sentenced to 37 months each

[flashl]

HOUSTON: Three British bankers, known as the NatWest Three, were each sentenced Friday to 37 months in jail for their role in a multimillion-dollar fraud involving the failed energy trader Enron.

In brief statements, David Bermingham, 45, Gary Mulgrew, 46, and Giles Darby, 45, told a U.S. District Court judge they were sorry for their misdeeds and accepted their punishment.

The three men denied their guilt for almost six years before pleading guilty in November to conspiring with the Enron finance chief, Andrew Fastow, to enrich themselves at the expense of their former employer, National Westminster Bank of England, or NatWest, now part of Royal Bank of Scotland.

Mulgrew, addressing Judge Ewing Werlein in Houston on Friday, said that he had shown a "lack of integrity" and "exercised poor judgement.

IHT