SFO lack of funds

According to the Bureau of Investigative Journalism, some companies under investigation by the Serious Fraud Office are spending up to ten times more than Britain’s anti-fraud and bribery organisation on legal and investigation fees, leaving the fraudsters outgunned and less effective.

The agency, which operates on a £52 million annual budget, has dropped 30 investigations since 2018, the year Lisa Osofsky assumed office as director, three of them over two days in October.

The agency has generated about £1.3 billion in fines and penalties against large businesses in the past five years and recently secured bribery convictions against Petrofac, the oilfield services company, and GPT Special Project Management, the Airbus defence subsidiary. In September, a joint investigation by the bureau and the BBC’s Panorama programme revealed evidence of the company paying informants for intelligence on competitors. In January, the agency ended its investigation into British American Tobacco without charge, saying insufficient evidence for any prosecutions. The SFO spent almost 18,000 hours investigating BAT over more than three years before dropping the case. BAT denied any wrongdoing and said its activities had been focused on combating the illicit trade in cigarettes.

Buckland, who was responsible for the SFO as solicitor-general between 2014 and 2019, said high staff turnover may have weakened the agency,

“Constantly having to shed staff and then rehire them doesn’t provide the continuity that prosecuting complex cases needs,” he said; this entails the company admitting to wrongdoing, pledging to improve its compliance with the law, paying a fine, and avoiding trial.

More than three quarters of the SFO’s departmental heads and senior leaders have left in the past three years, including its chief operating officer, general counsel, chief investigator, two divisional co-heads, and all three of its non-executive directors.

As a senior consultant, Sir David Green, who led the Serious Fraud Office until 2018, left to join Slaughter and May, the law firm.

Departees include Ben Morgan, joint head of bribery and corruption, who, in his new role as a partner at Freshfields Bruckhaus Deringer, is understood to have helped to negotiate a deferred prosecution agreement on behalf of G4S, the security firm, last year, and his predecessor Patrick Rappo, now at DLA Piper, where he has represented a former employee of BAT who has been linked to the Serious Fraud Office’s closed case.

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