Lord Justice Laws may have ruled yesterday that it would be "unduly simplistic" to treat the case of the NatWest 3 as a purely English affair, as with a wave of his hand he decreed that David Bermingham, Giles Darby and Gary Mulgrew ought to be tried in Texas, rather than London.

American prosecutors have alleged that the trio conspired with executives at Enron, the collapsed energy trader, to defraud their then employer — the NatWest subsidiary Greenwich Natwest — of $7.3 million through the cut-price sale of its stake in a Cayman Islands firm to Enron.

Thus an Act designed to deal with suspected terrorists has been used to ship three white-collar workers to America, amid all sorts of allegations of political trade-offs and diplomatic deals.

But, we asked, how does the court decision actually affect bankers, dealers and traders actively working in the City, some of whom will have worked alongside the NatWest 3, and others who may well have been carrying out the same sort of trades that have seen Messrs Bermingham, Darby and Mulgrew face an unwanted spell in a Texas court room, with severe doubts that they can expect a fair trial?

Central to the argument against the extraditions has been the notion that the alleged victim of the crime was NatWest, a UK bank - making an English court the only place for such a trial.

The alleged fraud is focused on the sale of an offshore company, created to house Enron assets. These are known as "structured" solutions. For Enron, they involved transferring financial assets (in most cases debt) away from the company's balance sheet and into special offshore investment vehicles. These vehicles are owned by a range of institutions and retain payment obligations to the beneficiaries of either the original or refinanced debt instruments. Unravel the structures and a raft of counterparties are uncovered - domiciled in different jurisdictions and reporting to differing regulatory authorities.

One dealer we spoke to said: "I, too, sold those offshore, off balance-sheet deals. They are not illegal, they are signed off by regulators and they remain a major tool in the structured financier's box - helping companies untangle the various risks on their balance sheet in order to marry those risks with the institutions and investors most adept at dealing with them.

"It's complex stuff, for sure, but a legitimate business - unless handled by a fraudster."

Not unreasonably, it is argued that these are international transactions and, until a global regulator is created (can you imagine that?), misdemeanours involving such structures will end up being pursued through the court system of any counterparty that feels aggrieved and thinks it can make a case. In this instance it was the US Government on behalf of Enron shareholders and employees.

None of which is in any respect unreasonable.

However, the problem for the NatWest 3 will be the Texas jury. Complex financial crimes are always a real test of the jury system: how many, arbitrarily collected groups of a dozen people will happily sit through the weeks of testimony and evidence and really understand all that is presented to them?

Worse still for the three Britons is that the Texan public may well perceive that it was those very financial structures which they worked on that brought down America's seventh largest company, and one of Houston's biggest employers.

Most Texans now equate those offshore structures with fraud, which means that the NatWest 3 will be judged guilty from the moment they appear in a Texan court and state their occupations - genuine fraudsters or not. Might an English court have concentrated on the alleged crime somewhat more dispassionately?