The Serious Fraud Office (SFO) has had an “I know better” culture that dates from before the appointment of the current Director, Lisa Osofsky, in 2018, the House of Commons’s Justice Committee has been told by a senior inspector.
In July this year two separate reviews were published that identified a series of failings at the SFO which led to the collapse of two criminal trials—the Unaoil case, which involved alleged bribes paid to Iraqi oil officials, and the case of Simon Marshall and Nicholas Woods, Serco executives who were acquitted on the orders of a judge.
Anthony Rogers, the deputy chief inspector at the Crown Prosecution Service Inspectorate, said the failings pointed out in those reviews “didn’t surprise” him.
Rogers told the committee on Wednesday: “Historically in the SFO we found a culture of non-compliance. People who think they know better. There is a cultural organisation problem which predates the current director.”
He said he had conducted an inspection of the SFO in 2018, when Osofsky, a former deputy general counsel and ethics officer at the FBI, had only been in the job for “six weeks” and they had begun a new inspection only last week.
Rogers said the full inspection report would not be completed until April 2023 but he said: “It appears culturally that the organisation has changed. But it’s early days.”
Osofsky’s own five-year term as director of the SFO is due to expire next year and there has been no word from the Attorney General, Michael Ellis, about extending it.
Rogers said the 2018 inspection had also revealed a widespread culture of “bullying” at the SFO and he said he understood Osofsky had been approaching that with a behaviour change programme.
Earlier the committee heard evidence from both Brian Altman, KC, who was commissioned by Osofsky to review the failures which led to the collapse of the Serco trial, and David Calvert-Smith, KC, who led the review into the Unaoil case.
Tory MP Asks if SFO Is ‘Fit for Purpose’
Conservative MP Laura Farris asked them if they thought the SFO was “fit for purpose.”Calvert-Smith said it was clear there had been “endemic” problems within the organisation but he said there was “cautious optimism” that things were beginning to change.
Calvert-Smith found Osofsky had made several “mistakes and misjudgments” in her handling of a former Drug Enforcement Administration agent, David Tinsley, who acted as a “fixer” for one of the Unaoil defendants.
In the Serco case it emerged that the chief investigator in the case, Kevin Davis, had claimed to have inadvertently wiped data from his SFO phone on a number of occasions.
Another member of the committee, Conservative MP Kieren Mullan, asked Calvert-Smith if he believed it was “credible” that the phone had been wiped of data “by mistake.”
Calvert-Smith replied: “I do think it’s credible, partly because I am quite absent-minded myself ... but it’s not impossible, I can’t say that it’s totally credible. We couldn’t come to a firm conclusion based on the evidence we had.”
Rogers added: “Kevin is not unique in the SFO. It was a common occurrence to wipe data, to require your phone to be reset or rebuilt ... the timing was unfortunate, it looks very unfortunate but it’s not absolutely unique, that the chief investigator, like others in that organisation, had maybe access to IT which is very, very difficult to negotiate for security reasons.”
When Osofsky appeared before the committee later, she was upbeat.
She said the SFO had had a “remarkable summer” with the convictions of Caribbean holiday fraudster David Ames, ethical investment fraud pair Andrew Skeene and Junie Bowers, and the resolution of the Glencore scandal, which will be sentenced next month.
Osofsky said she “regretted” her decision to meet with Tinsley and hand him over to the Unaoil investigators.
“Do I regret that I did that? Absolutely. Do I wish I had done things differently? I do. I see the impact on our office,” she added.
She said the SFO changed its internal policy in May 2020 so that they no longer meet with third parties who are not lawyers.
Osofsky said: “We need good disclosure officers. We need to be able to hire good disclosure counsel ... we have developed a bespoke and advanced training programme, we have reenergised the disclosure working group, we have disclosure champions, and we evaluate disclosure risk during quarterly reviews of our cases.”
