May contain nuts

Charles Flint, QC, acting for the FSA, told the presiding judge, Justice Munby, that the FSA intended to take the matter to appeal if it lost.

The original grounds for refusing to name the companies, put forward by the FSA at the Tribunal, were Ss.31, 43 and 44 of the Freedom of Information Act.

The new defence by the FSA at the High Court hearing hinged on S.348 of FISMA 2000 claiming that "the names themselves [the life insurance companies using Lautro charges], when taken with information already in the public domain, would breach S.348 because it would convey information covered by that section".

The ICO refuted this claim, saying that all parts of S.348 had to "apply before S.348 bites".

Underneath all the legal jargon, the FSA is vigorously defending its practice of regulation through informal operations.

The FSA claims that disclosing information provided voluntarily would deter companies from volunteering information in the future; this in turn would hamper the FSA's ability to investigate problems.

I'm afraid I regard that statement with the same sort of cynicism that I normally reserve for sightings of Elvis.

I find it hard to believe that life offices would decline to volunteer information in the future for FSA investigations. After all, volunteering information is likely to be in their own best interests, as it would show that they were willing to cooperate if any FSA findings were subsequently made public.

I suspect, therefore, that a much more likely reason for the FSA's vigorous defence of confidentiality is that such voluntary arrangements make the lives of the FSA's regulators a lot simpler - if information were not provided voluntarily the FSA would have to invoke legal powers to acquire information, and it might not necessarily know what details to ask for in order to get the right answers.

The FSA has spent nearly £60,000 on direct legal fees to Charles Flint and others, just to get the case this far. And this is just the FSA's direct fees - don't forget those of the ICO and their advisers, plus all the support staff on both sides needed to get the case this far in the first place.

I don't think the FSA can possibly justify spending so much money defending what increasingly seems to be the indefensible.

What I think is even more crazy about the FSA's stubborn stance on this whole matter is that one of the three reasons for the FSA's very existence, given on its website for all to see, is "helping retail consumers achieve a fair deal".

How can the FSA possibly square its current stand on the Lautro companies with that objective? The answer is simple - it can't.

The FSA stated in its submission to the ICO that, as a result of its investigations "each of the 12 companies voluntarily agreed to compensate their clients," which probably is helping the consumer - provided of course that compensation actually has been paid.