Andy_Langton - 8:37 pm on Feb 22, 2013 (gmt 0)

Am I to be penalised for what's been going on for years in every industry on every continent?

But that isn't what happened here. It doesn't take too much of a look at the link profile to see that this was about specifically buying anchor text links with the sole purpose of manipulating Google results. Literally a 10 second look at their links will tell you all of their main target keywords.