Serious Fraud Office in UK Law

It is accepted that the decisions of the Director are not immune from review by the courts, but authority makes plain that only in highly exceptional cases will the court disturb the decisions of an independent prosecutor and investigator: R v Director of Public Prosecutions, Ex p C [1995] 1 Cr App R 136, 141; R v Director of Public Prosecutions, Ex p Manning [2001] QB 330, para 23; R (Bermingham and others) v Director of the Serious Fraud Office [2006] EWHC 200 (Admin), [2007] QB 727, paras 63-64; Mohit v Director of Public Prosecutions of Mauritius [2006] UKPC 20, [2006] 1 WLR 3343, paras 17 and 21 citing and endorsing a passage in the judgment of the Supreme Court of Fiji in Matalulu v Director of Public Prosecutions [2003] 4 LRC 712, 735-736; Sharma v Brown-Antoine and others [2006] UKPC 57, [2007] 1 WLR 780, para 14(1)-(6).

The reasons why the courts are very slow to interfere are well understood. They are, first, that the powers in question are entrusted to the officers identified, and to no one else. No other authority may exercise these powers or make the judgments on which such exercise must depend. Secondly, the courts have recognised (as it was described in the cited passage of Matalulu)

The policy of the immunity is to enable people to speak freely without fear of being sued, whether successfully or not. If this object is to be achieved, the person in question must know at the time he speaks whether or not the immunity will attach. If it depends upon the contingencies of whether he will be called as a witness, the value of the immunity is destroyed.

In my judgment, as Mr Qureshi submitted, having regard to the treaty obligations it is right to start from the position that the letter of request is not a disclosable document, but justice must be done to those who are the subject of a section 2 notice pursuant to a letter of request and the consequential request from the Secretary of State to the Director of the Serious Fraud Office pursuant to section 4(2A) of the Act.

The purpose of the immunity is to protect witnesses against claims made against them for something said or done in the course of giving or preparing to give evidence.

As has been said many times in the authorities, it is not enough for a defendant to come to court and say that his assets are inadequate to meet the confiscation order, unless at the same time he condescends to demonstrate what has happened since the making of the order to the realisable property found by the trial judge to have existed when the order was made; see R -vC, unreported, 18 November 1997 and R -vW, unreported, 29 January 1998.

However, the situation is rather different where the investigation is into suspected criminality. One critical difference between civil proceedings and a criminal prosecution is that there is no inhibition on the commencement of civil proceedings where there is no foundation for them, other than the prospect of sanctions being imposed after the event.