The Natwest Three Are, in Reality, Arthur Daleys in Suits

On the eleventh floor of Houston's federal courthouse, a subdued collection of American local amateur football players squeezed onto the wooden public benches to lend support to three British bankers this week.

During 17 months on bail, the so-called NatWest Three - David Bermingham, Giles Darby and Gary Mulgrew - have made their mark on Texas's most populous city by kitting up for regular soccer matches in local parks.

In a detail which makes life slightly tricky, a defence lawyer always has to be at the game – because the trio's bail conditions ban them from talking to each other outside the presence of counsel. They have to run to the touchline regularly so their electronic ankle tags can make contact with a telephone device.

The three 45-year-old bankers have led truly peculiar lives here, thousands of miles away from their families and barred from travelling beyond the county line.

Of the trio, Darby seems to have thrown himself into Texas – he boasted to the New York Times recently that he had acquired two pairs of cowboy boots, filled his iPod with country and western music and proudly sported a Houston Astros baseball jersey.

In some ways, they make a likeable trio. Quizzed about their sobriety by judge Ewing Werlein as they entered their guilty pleas on Wednesday, two of them admitted to sinking some Dutch courage.

"One bottle of Miller Light last evening with my dinner," declared Darby sheepishly. Mulgrew was bolder: "I had two pints of Boddington's."

With dark curly hair and a broad Scottish accent, Mulgrew has a less bookish air than his two colleagues. Facing questions from reporters as he exited the courtroom, he gave a slight smile and mimed a zip across his mouth.

But it is something of a mystery just how they succeeded in capturing public attention as hapless victims of a harsh judicial system. Their tag as the "NatWest Three" invites comparison with victims of wrongful imprisonment such as the Birmingham Six, the Guildford Four and the Maguire Seven – but the parallels are flimsy, to put it mildly.

Their guilty pleas this week finally lay to rest any doubt that the trio acted both unethically and unlawfully in recommending that NatWest sold its investment in Swap Sub, an Enron-related venture in the Cayman Islands, for $1m.

Unbeknown to NatWest, the bank was selling this investment to Southampton LP – a vehicle in which the trio had a personal interest and which would shortly afterwards make a $20m profit by selling it on for its true value.

Within weeks of the scheme, all three resigned from NatWest. As soon as they were off the payroll, they received the proceeds from the scam from Andrew Fastow and Michael Kopper – two corrupt Enron executives who have since been jailed for fraud.

In emails seized by the FBI, the trio discussed how they were "going to get rich" and how they should keep the details quiet. Bermingham wrote to his colleagues: "Large numbers of people are asking what we are up to. I hate lies."

In a particularly damning turn of phrase, a presentation prepared by the trio for their counterparts at Enron which ruled out one particular option, explaining: "Problem is that it is too obvious (to both Enron and LPs [limited partnerships]) what is happening (ie, robbery of LPs), so probably not attractive. Also no certainty of making money."

In a triumph of the art of spin doctoring, an elaborate public relations campaign surrounding the trio has shifted attention to the inequities of Britain's extradition treaty with America. Campaigners pointed out last year that America had failed to ratify the treaty for its own citizens (it has since done so).

Human rights advocates suggested that the case would be better tried in Britain, pointing out that many of their fraudulent emails and faxes were sent from London.

From the FBI's perspective, those complaints ignore the bigger picture – that Bermingham, Mulgrew and Darby were linked to a much deeper US-based web of fraud which brought down Enron, costing 27,000 jobs. The wider scandal has so far led to 18 criminal convictions including the jailing of Enron's chief executive Jeffrey Skilling. The broad mass of evidence about Enron's detailed web of accounting resides in Houston, as do the key prosecution witnesses who worked at the energy trading firm.

The trio have had no qualms about putting their young children at the heart of their campaign. An interview with Birmingham's wife in the Times was headlined: "Can't they give daddy a lie detector test?"

The Mail on Sunday was even more tendentious in an interview with Darby's spouse, Deborah.

"How can I tell my girls daddy is being sent to an American jail – even though there's not a scrap of evidence against him," screamed the Sunday paper's headline, ignoring a miniature mountain of compelling documents compiled by the FBI.

Efforts to portray the former bankers as hapless innocents were never very convincing. Mulgrew has described himself as a "kick the door down" sort of a team leader.

All the indications suggest that they will end up in a British jail – possibly of the "open" variety - under a prisoner exchange program with the US. A Canadian who headed two key Enron divisions, David Delainey, has already been allowed to go north of the border to serve his sentence in his homeland.

The NatWest Three are, in reality, Arthur Daleys in suits - clever men motivated by the smell of money who weren't too fastidious about where the boundaries lay – a bit like Enron's chief financial officer Andrew Fastow who famously admitted to a jury that with millions of dollars swirling around, he had "lost his moral compass".

When controversy over their extradition was at its most raucous, government ministers rejected the "Natwest Three" soubriquet and persisted in referring to the trio as the "Enron Three" – a tag which the Conservatives ludicrously criticised as potentially prejudicial.

As this week's guilty plea demonstrated, the trio have nothing in common with the Birmingham Six or the Guildford Four except for the handy shorthand of a numerical name.