Top white-collar fraud police in Britain face heat over botched case            

Calls for reform of UK's Serious Fraud Office after 'litany of disasters' in recent years

The SFO is still essential to tackling complex financial crime but some lawyers argue it needs new leadership and more experienced UK criminal practitioners at the helm. Picture: Kirsty O'Connor/PA Wire

A London ruling that heavily criticised the behaviour of the country’s top fraud police officers capped a tough year for the Serious Fraud Office that saw prosecutions crumble and a conviction quashed.

The decision, which overturned a long-fought for guilty verdict in the Unaoil investigation, lambasted the agency for its inappropriate relations with a US fixer that triggered a review into its conduct from the UK’s most senior lawyer and led to calls for the agency’s head to resign.

The SFO’s recent track record makes for difficult reading. 

A fraud trial against ex-Serco Group collapsed, it faced accusations of deliberately destroying evidence in a civil lawsuit brought by a firm it was investigating, and it dropped its probe of individuals just months after securing a settlement with John Wood Group.

Before that, a trio of ex-Barclays bankers were acquitted of fraud charges after just six hours of jury deliberation and a fraud case against former Tesco executives was thrown out by a judge. The SFO declined to comment. 

“There’s been a litany of disasters over the past few years,” Joanna Dimmock, a partner at Paul Hastings who represented the Unaoil executive, said.

“I don’t think it needs to be the end of the SFO, but I do think it needs root-and-branch reform because I can’t see how there can be any confidence in the current system,” she said.

The SFO has had some success by securing guilty pleas from Petrofac and a unit of Airbus well as a string of settlements known as deferred prosecution agreements. 

Money-making deals

But it has led some to question whether the agency under the leadership of ex-FBI lawyer Lisa Osofsky is more focused on garnering money-making deals rather than putting white-collar criminals behind bars.

“From the point of view of doing deals with companies and bringing in revenue, they’re having a great couple of years, but if you’re judging them on being able to successfully prosecute individuals and companies of the most serious fraud and bribery then I’m afraid it’s a very poor record,” said Ross Dixon, a lawyer at Hickman and Rose. 

The SFO is still essential to tackling complex financial crime but some lawyers argue it needs new leadership and more experienced UK criminal practitioners at the helm.

The SFO declined to comment beyond its previous statements. In relation to the Unaoil ruling, it said it was cooperating with the UK attorney general’s review. 

It has previously said that deferred prosecution agreements are a “vital tool” to ensuring “offending companies are held to account and binds them to a strict regime of corporate responsibility”. 

• Bloomberg