By Mark Kleinman, City Editor
Proposals favoured by the Home Secretary to fold the Serious Fraud Office (SFO) into a wider crime-fighting agency could jeopardise high-profile inquiries into companies such as Barclays and Tesco, its head has warned.
In his first television interview since taking on the post nearly three years ago, SFO director David Green told Sky News that Theresa May's plans would be "massively disruptive to existing investigations".
His warning, just over three months before the General Election, threatens to spark a new row over the future of the SFO even as it continues its recovery from a string of embarrassing revelations about its performance.
Mr Green, a former barrister, said the hiatus triggered by the SFO's abolition would "provide succour to those individuals and companies who feel the right course is not to cooperate (with us) in the course of an investigation".
He acknowledged that decisions about the agency's future were "a matter for the government of the day" but insisted that "the idea of breaking up that model with no evidence that what one was moving to would be any better... is just not sensible".
In a wide-ranging interview, Mr Green said he understood public frustration over the lack of successful prosecutions of bank employees following the financial crisis and a string of trading scandals.
The SFO has about 80 people working on an investigation into the manipulation of the Libor interbank borrowing rate, with 13 people having been charged to date and one having pleaded guilty.
Asked whether he believed there was evidence to suggest that foreign exchange markets had been the subject of criminal fraud by traders, Mr Green said: "The statutory trigger for me to launch an investigation is for me to have reasonable grounds to suspect that the conduct may involve serious and complex fraud."
He added that he believes there was a case for criminal sanctions to be extended to the abuse of other important financial benchmarks, an approach that the Government has announced it will adopt.
The SFO chief refused to comment on any of the cases being examined by the agency, which also include Rolls Royce Holdings and Tesco.
He did not deny, however, suggestions of tensions between the SFO and the Financial Conduct Authority (FCA) around a £263m overstatement of profits at Britain's biggest retailer.
Insiders say that FCA officials were furious that the SFO's decision to launch a criminal inquiry in September effectively forced it to abandon its own case.
"We certainly had discussion about it and it was resolved in favour of a criminal investigation by us," he said.
"Obviously they saw things from their angle and we saw them from ours - but that often happens with Government agencies and we resolved any difficulty there was."
Under Mr Green's leadership, the SFO has improved its performance, settling an embarrassing damages claim filed by Vincent Tchenguiz and his brother Robert, who were arrested in 2010 as part of a botched probe by the agency.
Mr Green declined to apportion blame for historic failings but said that a review of the SFO's performance in November by the Crown Prosecution Service Inspectorate was based on fieldwork undertaken a year earlier.
"One of the things that report said was that the SFO was not in a position to do effective heavyweight investigations. I think that is demonstrably wrong," he said.
Recent successes for Mr Green's staff have included the conviction of a former hedge-fund manager from Weavering Capital and a one-time boss of JJB Sports.
He defended the length of time required to bring cases to trial, saying their complexity meant that was inevitable.
"I make no particular apology for that," he said. "I would rather do things correctly and thoroughly than rush to judgement."
Mr Green also said that while he had never had difficulty securing sufficient funding for cases being pursued by the SFO, he was concerned about the level of resource devoted to tackling "mid-level and lower levels" of fraud.
"Very good work is done by the National Crime Agency and the City of London Police but nowhere near sufficient resource is devoted to that in my view and that... is a matter of public confidence."
Mr Green's term as the SFO director is due to expire next year, but he said he had given no thought to extending it and had held no discussions about it.
"I love this job but... the choice of whether or not I continue is in the hands of whoever is attorney general at the time," he said.
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