FRANK QUATTRONE, the former Credit Suisse First Boston banker facing 18 months in jail for obstruction of justice, has launched a legal campaign to have his conviction quashed.

The move comes after a “very significant and very helpful” decision by the US Supreme Court last week to reverse a conviction against Arthur Andersen for obstruction of justice during the investigation into Enron, the collapsed energy trader.

Lawyers for Mr Quattrone, once one of Wall Street’s highest-paid bankers, have filed a 55-page legal brief setting out the similarities between the two cases.

Andersen was destroyed in 2001 after being accused of shredding five tonnes of documents that might have been needed to investigate the fraud at Enron, its former audit client.

However, last week the Supreme Court decided that workers at the accounting firm were only following its document retention guidelines and that they had never knowingly broken the law.

Mr Quattrone was found guilty of obstructing justice in an investigation into so-called hot IPO allocations, whereby his clients were allegedly offered shares in new listings in exchange for lucrative investment banking contracts.

The filing of the legal brief is Mr Quattrone’s last chance to make a written appeal against his conviction. The brief claims that the prosecution case, which hinges on a single e-mail sent by Mr Quattrone to his staff urging them to “clean up those files”, is nothing more than “a rope of sand”.

The prosecutors claimed that the e-mail was an order by Mr Quattrone for his staff to destroy files that might have been needed for the government investigation into the hot IPO case.

Mr Quattrone said that he knew that government investigators had subpoenaed his bank but that he did not know which documents they wanted. His lawyers claim, therefore, that he was merely following an established company document retention policy when he issued the e-mail order and that he never knowingly obstructed the investigation.

“Quattrone’s e-mail was not wrongful,” the brief states. “While there were subpoenas outstanding in this case, there was no evidence from which a jury could conclude that Quattrone knew what documents had been subpoenaed.”

Mark Pomerantz, Mr Quattrone’s lawyer, also said that the jury was wrongly instructed in Mr Quattrone’s case. Such a claim was also made, and upheld, in the Andersen case.

The brief reveals that the government prosecutors concede that Mr Quattrone’s sentence was wrongfully increased to 18 months when the maximum allowable under federal guidelines was 16 months.

The appeal will be heard in court next month.

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