8 - Mammon's conceit

Summary

In 1906 a group of sixteen leading ‘City men’ formed the ‘Bribery and Secret Commissions Prevention League, Incorporated’ to challenge those immoral and illegal commercial practices which they believed to be ubiquitous. The Times reported that this action ‘represents, and will increasingly represent, the moral sense of the commercial community and the attitude of all that is best in the business world towards a canker that has eaten deeply into the commercial integrity of which this country is justly proud’. Members of the Prevention League actively pursued prosecutions under the 1906 Prevention of Corruption Act, which extended to commercial transactions some of the provisions of the 1889 Public Bodies Corrupt Practices Act, which itself was the legislative response to the bribery and corruption in the Metropolitan Board of Works that had been exposed earlier by Harry Marks in the Financial News.

It might be thought that this campaign for moral rectitude in commercial affairs would have targeted the company promoters who knowingly foisted worthless shares on the public, or the financial journalists who ‘puffed’ companies in return for side payments, or the absentee directors who took money for nothing, or the accountants and auditors who casually certified the financial integrity of companies just weeks before they succumbed to insolvency. But those who were tried and convicted under the Prevention of Corruption Act were of an altogether different character.