"Guinness four" lose fight to overturn conviction.

AP -- Four men convicted 12 years ago of trying to rig the stock price of brewer Guinness PLC lost Monday in their attempt to have their convictions overturned.

The law lords, Britain's highest appeal court, rejected the claim of former Guinness chief executive Ernest Saunders and his three co-defendants _ known as the "Guinness Four"--that their 1990 trial was unfair under European human rights law.

The four claim the lower Court of Appeal was obliged to quash their convictions in light of subsequent European human rights rulings that they did not get a fair trial.

They argued that they were wrongly deprived of their right to silence by being compelled to give evidence to government inspectors that was then used as evidence against them in court.

In 1996, the European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg agreed.

However, the five law lords unanimously upheld the prosecution contention that English law as it stood at the time of the 1990 trial could not be trumped by later decisions of the European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg.

Britain did not incorporate the European Convention on Human Rights into law until 1998.

The Strasbourg court ruled that Saunders, Gerald Ronson, Anthony Panes and Jack Lyons were robbed of their right not to be required to incriminate themselves because evidence they were compelled by law to give to Department of Trade inspectors was later used against them at their trial.

Parliament has since amended the law to conform to that judgment.

But the law lords held that that amendment had no retrospective effect. They said the Court of Appeal had been bound to accept the law as it stood at the time of trial.

Ben Emmerson, representing the four appellants, said during the appeal that they might go back to the Strasbourg court

The four were convicted on charges relating to manipulation of the stock market to inflate the price of Guinness shares. Their goal had been to make the shares more attractive before Guinness' successful stock and cash offer in a takeover battle for Scottish liquor company Distillers in 1986.

Saunders, Ronson, Lyons and Parnes lost an earlier appeal in 1995.

Saunders, 64, served 10 months of a 2 1/2-year sentence, and was released after he was diagnosed as suffering from pre-senile dementia. He now says the diagnosis was mistaken.

Ronson, 61, served six months in prison and was fined S8 million.

Parnes, 54, was sentenced to 21 months in prison.

Lyons, 84, was spared prison because of ill health, but paid a fine of S4 million and was stripped of his knighthood.