Serious Fraud Office (United Kingdom) - Criticisms

Criticisms

In 2008, an official internal "Review of the Serious Fraud Office" compared the SFO unfavourably with two of its counterparts in New York City: the offices of the United States Attorney for the Southern District of New York and the New York County District Attorney. It found that the American prosecutors obtained higher conviction rates in a shorter amount of time with fewer resources. It also found that the SFO had significantly lower conviction rates than elite divisions of the UK Crown Prosecution Service. It attributed the SFO's relatively poor performance to, among other things, failure to keep all court advocacy "in-house", failure to assign each case a single lawyer who managed it "from cradle to grave", failure to interview witnesses at an early stage, and failure to co-operate closely with the police.

The Al-Yamamah arms deal during the 1980s was a large scale aircraft and weapons deal between the UK and Saudi Arabia. It was extended throughout the 1990s and saw thousands of UK citizens living and working in Saudi Arabia representing £40bn worth of business. BAE Systems Plc was the primary contractor.

In 2004 the SFO began to investigate the contracts within the al-Yamamah deal on the grounds of suspected false accounting, but the investigation was controversially dropped in 2006. The decision was made following concerns about national security amidst reports that the Saudi Government would stop sharing counter terrorist information with the UK if the investigation continued. This drew criticism from number of sources, not least from the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD). A High Court review in 2008 ruled that the SFO had acted unlawfully by dropping the corruption investigation but was later overturned on appeal by the SFO to the House of Lords.