Nov. 13 (Bloomberg) -- It has a chapel, a cricket pitch and a library. Its grounds, bordered by a river that meets the coast just over a mile away, feature views of a castle set amid rolling hills. What sounds like an English prep school is instead a destination for convicted financial criminals.

Ford Open Prison, 65 miles south of London, is one of the 13 minimum-security jails in England and Wales, housing 550 inmates. It may be the new home for Matthew and Neel Uberoi, convicted in the latest case of insider trading to be filed by the Financial Services Authority. They face a maximum of seven years when they are sentenced in December after a jury found them guilty last week.

British prosecutors, including those at the FSA and the Office of Fair Trading, have pledged to file more charges against people who may have contributed to the worst financial crisis in a generation. Those convicted in London are often sent to Ford because of its proximity to the capital.

“You have two very different categories of inmate at an open prison: white-collar inmates and then people towards the end of their sentences being readied for the outside world,” said Charles Brocket, an English lord who spent nine months of a seven-and-a-half-year sentence at Ford for insurance fraud. White-collar criminals “will get there and find that in the hut next to them there is a chap who has done 22 years for murder.”

As a former Royal Air Force base, Ford inmates live in the old officers’ barracks, huts that haven’t changed much since the 1960s when it converted to a prison, according to Brocket, who is now a television host.

Best, Saunders

Ford has hosted other famous guests including George Best, the late Manchester United soccer player, and Ernest Saunders, the former head of Guinness Plc, sent to prison in 1990 for creating a false market in the company’s shares during the 1986 battle between Guinness and Argyll Group Plc for Distillers Company Plc. He had his sentence halved after a medical report found he had pre-senile dementia. He later took a job as a consultant for Carphone Warehouse Plc.

Christopher McQuoid, the former general counsel of Motorola Inc.’s TTP Communications Plc, whom the FSA successfully prosecuted in its first criminal insider-trading case in March, also spent four months there.

The Uberois were found guilty of 12 of 17 counts of insider trading. The FSA has now won both of the insider-trading cases it has filed that have reached a jury trial. Robert Brown, their lawyer, declined to comment on whether the Uberois will appeal.

Financial criminals are often deemed not “to be a risk to the public or in danger of escaping” and can be sent to an open prison, according to Britain’s Ministry of Justice. It declined to make Ford’s governor available for an interview.

Family Ties

“Time spent in open prisons affords prisoners the opportunity to find work, re-establish family ties, reintegrate into the community and ensure housing needs are met,” the Ministry said in a statement. “All those located in open conditions have been risk-assessed and categorized as being of low risk to the public.”

The inmates have jobs in the nearest community, Littlehampton. While it has an estuary replete with swans and sailboats, its high street has an empty Woolworths Group Plc store -- one scar from Britain’s deepest recession since World War II.

Ford’s inmates “do work like sweeping the roads,” said Deborah Gould, 40, who has lived in Littlehampton all her life and works at a newsstand. “I think it’s good that they go out and earn their own money.”

‘Luxurious by Comparison’

They also work in the area’s nurseries where the prison has a contract to grow all the plants for the local parks and gardens, according to Dawn Crawford, a spokeswoman at Arun District Council.

Ford’s prisoners start their day at 8:15 a.m. with breakfast. The food is “technically edible,” according to Brocket, who went to Eton College, the boarding school attended by Princes William and Harry, and was in the British army. “Ford was a bit more luxurious by comparison.”

Financial criminals in the U.K. don’t have to endure the conditions for long. Sentences for company-related fraud are a fraction of the penalties handed out in the U.S., where terms increase in proportion to the size of thefts.

“These guys, they’ve ripped off everybody,” said Mark Strotten, a taxi driver from Littlehampton. “If all they’re going to do is send them out after six months, they should have a spell at a much harder prison.”

Steak, Cigars

Gerald Ronson, chief executive officer of Heron International, also went to Ford in the 1990s over the Guinness scandal. One of his petrol stations is a quarter of a mile from the prison. In his autobiography, “Leading From the Front,” he describes being able to smoke cigars and eat steak and trifle at the prison -- if you knew who to ask.

“I had no trouble getting anything,” he wrote. “In fact, everybody in the prison seemed to have his own racket, peddling this or that.”

The European Court of Human Rights found in 2000 that Ronson’s and Saunders’ trial had been unfair because self- incriminating evidence was used. The U.K. Court of Appeal in 2001 ruled that they had had a fair trial.

A report by the U.K. chief inspector of prisons in May found that the smuggling of alcohol into Ford “had become a significant problem.”

“Even in the most secure institutions, there is still access to drink and drugs,” said David Wilson, a professor of criminology at Birmingham City University, who was once the youngest active governor of a U.K. prison. “It comes via staff and visitors. In open prisons there is no need for it to come via staff because prisoners go out into the community” so can buy it themselves.

They risk having their sentences lengthened, or being sent to a more secure prison if they get caught, Wilson said. Trust underpins the philosophy of an open prison.

“Ford is not a country club,” Ronson wrote. “In some ways, an open prison -- where you can see an open gate and traffic going past -- is worse than being locked up where you don’t see anything, because in an open prison, freedom is an easy 100-yard walk away.”

To contact the reporters on this story: Caroline Binham in London at cbinham@bloomberg.net

Last Updated: November 12, 2009 20:01 EST