The real criminals of the financial crisis

In the frenzied search since Meltdown Monday for people to blame for the financial crisis, non-executive directors have been let off surprisingly lightly.

The angry finger of accusation has pointed at all sorts of groups, from greedy hedge-funders to feeble financial authorities, from ignorant politicians to wilfully blind bankers, from silly shareholders to unscrupulous speculators. But non-executives have usually been left off the list of shame.

This is very odd. For if it is the responsibility of anyone to watch over businesses, restrain their excesses and warn them about risk or wrong-doing, it is the non-executives.

This must have struck the most idle of observers when a couple of years ago the charismatic Lord Black, proprietor of the Telegraph group, first found himself in the soup. What were the non-executives doing?

How did they fail to see what was cooking?

They were after all an exceptionally intelligent, influential and experienced group of people; the non-executives on the board of Hollinger, through which Conrad Black owned the Telegraph group, included Henry Kissinger, Lord Weidenfeld, Alfred Taubman, Marie-Josee Kravis and Richard Perle, all of them lords (or ladies) of the universe as Tom Wolfe might have put it. Was it not their duty to keep an eye on things and make a fuss if anything seemed to be amiss?

The same questions must surely apply to the non-executives of all the organisations whose mismanagement has contributed to the current crisis. Don't the non-executives bear a large share of the blame?

Fools rush in, of course, and it is difficult for outsiders (or, indeed, insiders) to understand the mysterious workings of high finance and management. Whole libraries have been written about the role of non-execs, and perhaps it is indeed very complex.

But the Institute of Directors publishes a very helpful fact-sheet on the role of