On this day, 38 years ago, on October 8, 1987 (August 16, 1987, the protagonists of Britain's "biggest economic scandal of the century" were arrested one after another. On October 8, 1987, the famous British businessman Sir Jack Lyons was arrested at his home in London on charges of illegally obtaining a huge amount of £ 3 million from the Guinness Group. On October 13, millionaire Gerald Ronson, owner of the Herren Group, Britain's second-largest private company, was arrested in London on charges of illegally obtaining a huge amount of £ 6 million from the Guinness Group. On the same day, former Guinness Group chairman and general manager Ernest Sanders was charged in a London court with 37 crimes, including stealing a huge amount of £ 20 million in stolen money from the Guinness Group. Sanders was arrested in May 1987. He was originally charged with making false accounts and destroying criminal evidence. In early October, London stock market broker Anthony Panes was arrested by police as soon as he stepped off a plane in the western American city of Los Angeles and was jailed on charges of making false invoices worth 5.5 million pounds for Guinness. He will be extradited from the United States back to the United Kingdom for trial. So far, more than 10 companies and banks based in the United Kingdom, the United States, Switzerland, the Netherlands and Austria have been implicated in the scandal exposed in early 1987, and no fewer than dozens of "big figures" in the financial and business circles have been involved. Since 1986, a trend of mergers in the City of London has prevailed. One of the largest mergers was that the Guinness Group, which is famous around the world for its beer brewing, defeated its strong rival Argyll Supermarket Group in 1986 and annexed the UK's largest Scotch whisky manufacturer, British Liquor Company, for a huge sum of 2.7 billion pounds. It was this "biggest annexation of the century" that caused Britain's "biggest economic scandal of the century." With the exposure of the "Guinness Merger Scandal", coupled with the disclosures of former Guinness Financial Director Oliver Lu and others, and the investigation by the police, the truth of the matter is now becoming clearer and clearer. It turned out that the heads of the Guinness Group headed by Sanders used the following illegal methods in this merger war: first, engaging in "insider transactions", that is, using official agencies to bribe information from insiders who have key internal secrets of competitors; second, secretly using their own huge amounts of money to buy their own stocks under the guise of other companies; The third is to collude with relevant large companies and businessmen to manipulate stock prices. For example, Sir Jack Lyons received a huge "facilitation fee" of £ 3 million from the Guinness Group for his "valuable consulting services"; Ronson colluded with Sanders to subscribe for £ 25 million in Guinness shares, and he received a "facilitation fee" of £ 5.8 million from the Guinness Group. In the 30 days of the final showdown between Guinness Group and Argyll Group, Guinness shares unexpectedly surged by 26%, although Argyll shares appreciated by 12.8%. According to newspaper reports here, Sanders also paid a total of nearly 20 million pounds to companies and banks in the United States, Switzerland, Austria, the Netherlands and other countries as a reward. After the incident was exposed, Sanders and others also forged accounts and destroyed criminal evidence in an attempt to muddle through.