Philippe Moryoussef makes an unlikely fugitive from the law. He’s not hiding out in a cave in a mystery destination in Afghanistan or Bolivia. He lives in an apartment in the centre of Paris; if you walk around the corner you see the Eiffel Tower a short distance away, looming large. Sharing his home are his wife Karine, and their two sons who attend a local school. From the outside it looks like he leads a more-or-less normal life.
But Moryoussef ’s situation is anything but normal. No one will employ him. If he came to the UK, he’d stand a good chance of being handcuffed, bundled into a police van and sent directly to His Majesty’s Prison, Wandsworth. That’s because he’s been on the run from British justice ever since he was found guilty of ‘manipulating’ interest rates by a jury at a London trial – a trial at which he wasn’t present to defend himself because he chose not to turn up.
But Moryoussef had his reasons for not attending. His supporters say that far from being a fraudster, he’s one of a number of victims of an international cover-up at the top of the financial system, that’s led to a series of miscarriages of justice.
“I don’t want to criticise British justice as a whole,” he says. “But in this story, it has been frightening. You know, I believed in the justice system, I went through all the
