The tragic story of an Englishman who took his own life for fear of the regulatory repercussions of his actions is a sign of the times.

The labyrinth of regulatory rules that financiers have to observe on pain of severe punishment is now an ever-present threat to their livelihoods, and nowhere more so than in the United Kingdom.

James Bedingfield, 45, was a senior investment director in Investec Wealth & Investment’s offices in Sheffield. His sins, a coroner was told recently, were to email some documents about a client to someone he had known for years but who was not qualified by the rules of the Financial Conduct Authority (or, as reports claim, its predecessor the Financial Services Authority) to receive them, and to talk to that person on his mobile phone without the conversation being recorded. He shot himself in the woods near his mansion in November.

In the run-up to the tragedy, according to the Daily Mail, somebody at his workplace had told him that his job was safe (an assurance that he perhaps did not believe) but he also knew that his annual bonus had been put 'on hold' and he had been summoned to London to meet his CEO. His career at Investec, where he was known to be a consciencious and methodical man, spanned 22 years. The Mail said that the unnamed client to whom he sent the documents was not registered with the FSA. The coroner at Chesterfield Coroners Court said that he had made an 'honest mistake.' Investec declined to comment on any rules that the manager might have broken.

The Senior Managers and Certification Regime, which is about to apply in a few different forms to all financial services, will allow and compel regulators to scrutinise the actions of senior managers even more closely than today. It will, in the fullness of time, be quite common for a twenty-year-old telephone conversation to come back to haunt someone long departed from the company that recorded it, or indeed long departed from the world of finance altogether.

Every firm already reports the misdeeds of senior managers to the regulator on the Form D on Connect (an FCA system on which firms submit applications and notifications) within seven business days of them happening. For all other 'conduct staff,' the SM&CR will oblige it to notify the regulator of such misconduct every year on the new REP008 on GABRIEL, the FCA's online system for collecting and storing regulatory data submitted by firms.

During the premiership of Gordon Brown, the British Government began to threaten to make rules to prevent anyone who fell foul of financial regulators from being admitted to, or becoming a manager in, a bewildering kaleidoscope of other regulated sectors that have nothing to do with finance. Overall government policy today anticipates a full-spectrum regulatory net that takes in more and more business sectors and is run increasingly by the Government, through its wholly-owned corporations such as the FCA, ever-more tightly.

Many wealth managers do stressful jobs even before one considers the regulatory climate in which they operate. It is, increasingly, a climate of fear.