U.K. Fraud Chief Accused of Misrepresenting Trial Collapse
U.K. Fraud Chief Accused of Misrepresenting Fraud Trial Collapse
(Bloomberg) --
The head of the U.K’s fraud prosecutor was accused of misrepresenting to lawmakers how a key trial collapsed.
Lawyers for a defendant acquitted in the Serco Group Plc fraud trial last year wrote to the head of a parliamentary select committee last week “to correct a number of factual misstatements made by” the Serious Fraud Office’s Lisa Osofsky, according to a letter from London firm Peters & Peters.
Osofsky “appears to have a fundamental misunderstanding of the factors that led to the collapse of the Serco Case,” the lawyers said in the Feb. 17 letter.
The letter piles yet more pressure onto the beleaguered prosecutor, which has come under fire for the way it has been handling its biggest investigations. Attorney General Suella Braverman said this month that a separate review into the Unaoil bribery case will focus on disclosure failings as well as contact with third-parties. She announced the investigation last year after becoming “deeply concerned” following a ruling that found serious failings and resulted in the quashing of one of the convictions in the Unaoil case.
An SFO spokesperson didn’t immediately comment on the letter.
The SFO’s case against two ex-Serco directors, which alleged they concealed 12 million pounds ($16.3 million) in profits from the U.K. Ministry of Justice, fell apart in the middle of the trial last year because the prosecutor failed to disclose board meeting minutes to the defense.
Earlier this month, Osofsky gave oral evidence to lawmakers about the case as part of a look into the SFO’s budget overspend as a result of being ordered to pay legal costs after the trial. Osofsky commissioned an external lawyer to review what led to the trial collapse.
“This is all the more troubling when the SFO express an intention to learn from their mistakes and to avoid such events recurring in the future,” the lawyers, Neil Swift and Rebecca Meads, said in the letter. They said they want to put right any “inadvertent misrepresentations” of the facts of this case over how it collapsed.
During the Feb. 9 hearing Osofsky told lawmakers that the disclosure failures happened in part because the defense’s case evolved over time.
“There came a point in time when we were asked for a document and we realized, ‘Oh my goodness. They do not have that document. We had better check and see, and give it to them,” told the committee.
Her version of events is “incorrect,” the defense lawyers said in the letter. They say they wrote to the SFO in 2016 highlighting the importance of board meetings in the case and made repeated and early requests for disclosure before the trial. They also said Osofsky “omitted to refer” to the judge’s concerns about the nature of the SFO’s case in last year’s ruling.
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