It should have been a well-earned climax to 33 years as a hard-working chief executive in the international business world — but instead of days playing golf and leisurely holidays with his wife, Ian Norris’s retirement turned into a “living nightmare” and a ceaseless round of visits to lawyers’ offices.

“I exchanged everything I’d planned for — time with friends and so on — for a bunch of lawyers,” he says.

On Thursday the Kafkaesque legal battle that has overshadowed his life and that of wife, Sheila, 64, for five years comes to a head in the House of Lords.

Mr Norris, 65 today, is launching a last-ditch appeal to prevent his extradition to the United States, where he is wanted by the authorities for alleged price-fixing in the 1990s, when he was a senior executive of Morgan Crucible, the carbon manufacturing giant.

“To move suddenly from being someone in a responsible business position [he was in charge of 43 operating companies across 30 countries] into one where the Americans regard you as a fugitive from justice is not a very nice feeling,” he says, with understatement.

His case, which is being watched keenly by other leading businessmen, as well by as the Serious Fraud Office, will be the first test in Britain’s highest court of the controversial new fast-track extradition arrangements between Britain and America.

Organisations such as Justice and Liberty have lined up to back Mr Norris’s case, along with the business and legal communities.

Unlike the NatWest Three, who were extradited last year, no evidence of a case against Mr. Norris has been put forward by United States prosecutors. Instead, they have provided basic information about the indictment, which is all that is technically necessary under the Extradition Act 2003.

Under the 2003 Act, the alleged conduct need only be a crime in both the UK and the US and carry a jail term in both countries of more than 12 months.

Mr Norris and his lawyers maintain that there is no case for extradition because nothing that he did was a crime under English law when he did it, and price-fixing was widespread commercial practice, outlawed with a specific offence in the UK only in 2003. The US authorities will argue that it was a crime at the time in question because it was covered by England’s common law offence of “conspiracy to defraud”.

Despite widespread condemnation across all political parties, the Government has not reformed the extradition scheme. “The frustration for me,” Mr Norris says, “is that I can’t talk about the case because I don’t know what is specifically alleged against me.”

Alistair Graham, Mr Norris’s solicitor and head of litigation at White & Case, said: “Ian’s situation is Kafkaesque. He does not know the case against him and there is no opportunity to contest the charges in England. The whole case is a travesty of justice, the worst I have ever seen.”

Mr Norris’s ordeal began at the end of 2002 when he had just begun his retirement. Travel was high on the list of priorities for Mr Norris and his wife and the burly Welshman and keen rugby fan had planned a trip to the 2003 Rugby World Cup in Australia.

At the last minute had to cancel it because he had heard that he had been indicted by the US Department of Justice and there was a good chance, his lawyers advised, that he would be seized and held if he stopped somewhere en route such as Singapore or Thailand.

Since then, he has been confined to the UK, unable to make plans, living at his home by the River Thames in Maidenhead, Berkshire, and supported by his family. The couple have two sons and two grandsons.

At the heart of the appeal will be a challenge to the notion that price-fixing can be equated with conspiracy to defraud and therefore is extraditable.

“Price-fixing cannot be prosecuted using the English common law offence of conspiracy to defraud,” Mr Graham said. “There is a key difference: with the English common law offence, there has to be an intention to do wrong. That is not the case with price-fixing: being in a cartel in itself does not amount to dishonesty.”

If Mr Norris fails, his lawyers will appeal to the European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg. If he is extradited he is likely to be forced to admit guilt in a “plea bargain”. About 35 witnesses were approached to go to the United States to testify for the NatWest three and declined, because of the personal risks to themselves. As a result, a guilty plea was the only option.

The new extradition regime came into force on January 1, 2004, and the magistrate’s hearing where Mr Norris’s extradition was agreed was in May 2005.

The Act’s original aim was to deal with terrorist suspects and Caroline Flint, then the Home Office Minister, said that it would not apply to cases such as price-fixing.

American prosecutors have pursued cases zealously. Mr Norris is a significant test case for them: he would be the first individual worldwide to be extradited to the US for price-fixing conduct. Mr Norris says that 30 other suspects could follow.

An amendment is before Parliament that would redress some of the imbalance in the present extradition regime, but it needs Government support.

Ironically it was Mr Norris who originally exposed cartel-fixing in Europe when he took over as chief executive of Morgan Crucible in 1998.

Norris by numbers

1969 Ian Norris begins career at Morgan Crucible

1998 becomes chief executive

1989-2002 US authorities allege that he fixed the prices of carbon components in trains and destroyed evidence

2000: March - Competition Act 1998 outlawing price-fixing in UK takes effect

2002 retires early in October because of ill-health

2002 indicted by US Grand Jury – postpones travel plans

2002 Morgan Crucible and its US subsidiary plead guilty to charges of price-rigging and obstruction of justice

2003 two former Morgan Crucible employees plead guilty to charges connected with price-fixing

2003 UK Government introduces specific offence of price-fixing

2004 Extradition Act 2003 takes effect on January 1

2004 US formally files extradition request with UK authorities on last day of the year

2005 District judge rules that Mr Norris must be extradited and sends case to Secretary of State

2006 February – appeal to divisional court rejected

2007 January – appeal to Court of Appeal rejected

2007 March: Lawyers White & Case win right to take to Lords

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