The head of the UK’s Serious Fraud Office came under pressure over her future from MPs on Wednesday in the wake of the anti-corruption agency’s failings in two high-profile cases last year, one of which led to a quashed conviction.
Lisa Osofsky said she had not decided whether to seek an extension to her term, which ends in 2023, after she was pressed on whether she might continue by Meg Hillier, chair of the House of Commons public accounts committee.
There had been “some speculation . . . particularly at the end of last year about your future at the SFO,” Hillier said, adding: “Will you be seeking an extension to your term in office?”
Osofsky replied: “We have an 84 per cent success rate in our cases so I am not walking back and feeling in any way anything other than pride in what we’ve been able to deliver.” When pressed, she conceded she had not decided whether to seek an extension to her term.
Her appearance before MPs coincided with an announcement by attorney-general Suella Braverman that she had appointed David Calvert-Smith, a former High Court judge and director of public prosecutions, to investigate the failings of the SFO in the case against a former executive at Unaoil, an oil and gas consultancy.
The government launched the probe into the agency’s handling of the Unaoil case after a court ruled in December that it had denied the former oil and gas executive the right to a fair trial and quashed his conviction.
MPs on the committee also pressed Osofsky on the collapse of the trial in April of two former Serco executives after the agency failed to disclose some evidence to the defence.
The error brought the SFO’s seven-and-a-half-year probe into alleged fraud over a prisoner tagging contract to a humiliating end, leaving the agency with a £2.6mn overspend in its 2020-21 annual budget.
Hillier said the overspend resulted from “a single failed court case which went so badly wrong that the judge ordered the SFO should pay the other side’s costs.”
Pressed by MPs on what she had done to prevent a repeat of the Serco fiasco, Osofsky said she “saw [the collapse of the trial] as a real call for change and for needing to strengthen our controls”. She added that she had commissioned an independent review into the failings and beefed up disclosure training for staff.
“I stay up nights wondering how we could have missed this [document]. We went through almost 2mn documents, how could it be that this one didn’t get turned over . . . We’re human beings, we make mistakes,” she told MPs.
During the committee hearing, Liz Corrin, the SFO’s chief financial officer, said the extra costs associated with the Unaoil case agency were one of the main reasons why the agency had asked for an extra £1mn this financial year to the end of March.
SFO head Lisa Osofsky quizzed by MPs over her future
Pinoy Variant