So that’s why they called it an oil rig!

FIRST it was the banks, now it’s the oil companies. In the same way the bankers rigged interest rates to maximise their profits and bonuses, traders at BP and Shell stand accused of fixing artificially high oil prices.

Just as manipulating inter-bank lending rates put up the cost of borrowing for everyone, so it is alleged that a conspiracy to inflate the price of crude oil has cost each British motorist £2,000 at the pumps over the past ten years.

Fraud investigators working for the European Commission this week raided the London offices of three major oil companies in search of evidence.

There’s no need to dwell on the minutiae of this kind of outrageous scam. Essentially, it boils down to traders pretending they have paid more for oil than they actually have. It’s called lying.

The inflated figure pushes up the price which retailers have to pay for the petrol they sell to motorists. Naturally, the extra cost is passed on at the pump.

Some industry experts believe that as a direct result of this cynical manipulation of the market, petrol prices may be 20 per cent higher than they should be. In the past, we have tended to blame the exorbitant cost of filling our tanks on heavy t axes i mposed by successive governments.

Compared with the 60 per cent plus raked off by the Treasury in VAT and duty, the profit made by the oil companies in exchange for drilling, refining and transporting their product to thousands of petrol stations seemed relatively modest.

But, to his credit, George Osborne cancelled Gordon Brown’s automatic fuel tax escalator and has cut duty by 1p. Yet the price of a litre has continued to rise inexorably, up from 75p to 133p since 2002, when the price-rigging is said to have begun.

We first realised the oil traders were up to something when we saw giant tankers moored off British ports for weeks at a time, waiting for prices to rise again before making their deliveries.

This was profiteering at its worst, or so we thought. We are now told the oil companies have been ripping us off to the tune of billions of pounds simply by juggling a few decimal points on a computer screen.

David Cameron says that those responsible should be jailed. The Energy Secretary Ed Davey has promised that any guilty men will ‘face the full force of the law’. That would appear to be little more than wishful thinking. No one has been sent to prison in Britain as a result of any banking malpractice, not even for rigging interest rates, which put up the cost of mortgages and other borrowing and helped bring about the economic crash.

AND it turns out that new legislation designed to prevent a repeat of the l ending rate scandal does not apply to the oil industry and can’t be imposed retrospectively. It is instructive that this week’s raids on the oil company headquarters were mounted not by British Government investigators, but by the European Commission.

Our own Office of Fair Trading has been asleep at the wheel and reluctant to impose a tough regulatory system on the oil firms.

Last year, the OFT concluded that ‘competition was working well’ in the oil markets.

Britain has always been notoriously limp-wristed when it comes to tackling corporate corruption.

In America, they realise that for the free market to work in the interests of everyone, it has to be coupled with a rigorous regulatory regime and a willingness to come down like a ton of bricks on reckless, greedy executives who break the rules.

Plenty of former high-flyers from the finance industry who brought about the banking crash are now behind bars. On the other side of the Atlantic, the disgraced ex-RBS boss Fred Goodwin wouldn’t just have been stripped of his knighthood, he’d have been stripped of his liberty for a very long time.

Kenneth Lay, head of the collapsed, corrupt Enron energy giant, was indicted and found guilty of corporate abuse and accounting fraud. He died before he could be sentenced to between 20 and 30 years.

So if some way can be found of bringing criminal charges against the oil companies in Britain, can we expect to see the bosses of Shell and BP in the dock at the Old Bailey?

Don’t hold your breath. Any pricerigging will be blamed on junior traders well down the pecking order.

The best solution so far has been put forward by the Tory MP Robert Halfon, who wants the Government to impose massive, punitive windfall taxes on the oil companies.

But instead of simply handing over the fines to the Exchequer, Halfon says the money should be used to cut fuel duty and slash the price of petrol at the pump.

Britain’s hard-pressed motorists have suffered enough.