The Serious Fraud Office is a specialist investigating and prosecuting authority that tackles the top-level of serious or complex fraud, bribery and corruption in England and Wales, and Northern Island.
On July 30 2024, the SFO published its annual report for the period April 1 2023 to March 31 2024. This provides an overview of the SFO’s performance, objectives and future strategy.
This annual report is the first under the new director of the SFO, Nick Ephgrave, who took over from Lisa Osofsky in October 2023.
The annual report begins with a summary of the SFO’s goals over the past year. The SFO’s goals over the April 1 2023 to March 31 2024 period were to:
- sharpen their casework to bring results more quickly;
- build strong, supportive and mutually beneficial relationships with their domestic and international colleagues; and
- re-energise their working culture by investing in their people and the tools they need to succeed.
Ephgrave points to some key successes over the past 12 months to demonstrate the SFO meeting these goals, amongst them being:
- carrying out multiple executive action initiatives, with 15 sites searches and 15 arrests;
- taking three cases to trial in the past year;
- opening six criminal investigations; and
- closing six criminal investigations after applying the full code test.
The SFO has used various tools to achieve these results, in particular their new powers through the Economic Crime and Corporate Transparency Act 2023, which expanded the SFO’s section 2A pre-investigation powers.
This allows the SFO to utilise their compulsory powers at earlier stages of an investigation in order to compel people to answer questions and provide documents, as well as to apply for a warrant to search premises during an investigation. In international cases, the powers can be used prior to opening an investigation.
The SFO’s section 2A powers have also been extended to all circumstances where the SFO has “reasonable grounds to suspect” that an offence involving serious or complex fraud has taken place, including for domestic bribery or corruption cases.
This provides the SFO with greater flexibility at the pre-investigation stage and, according to the annual report, these powers were reportedly used for the first time in early 2024.
The SFO has also put in place a five-year strategy, stemming from a consultation exercise internally, to set the stage for the 2024 to 2029 period. The strategy describes its future plans fairly broadly, which are similar to the goals set out for the 2023 to 2024 period just with greater emphasis on the longer-term implementation of these intentions.
Against a backdrop of recent criticism, it is clear from this strategy that the SFO is thinking long term on how to meet their intentions and generally make improvements.
Areas for improvement
While the annual report, expectedly, focuses largely on the successes the SFO has had over the course of the year, no discussion of the SFO’s performance would be complete without consideration of areas for improvement and the report does acknowledge this.
An undisputed key area for improvement is the SFO's disclosure regime.
The SFO clarifies that they are working closely with the Home Office for an independent review of the criminal disclosure regime. The SFO states that they do not consider the UK’s current disclosure regime “fit for use in today’s justice system”, and while many legal practitioners would not disagree with their findings, it cannot be denied that the SFO has experienced some serious disclosure shortcomings in the past year.
