Unlock the Editor’s Digest for free
Roula Khalaf, Editor of the FT, selects her favourite stories in this weekly newsletter.
The UK Serious Fraud Office has agreed to pay a settlement to Eurasian Natural Resources Corporation, ending one part of a years-long legal battle that exposed damaging facts about how the agency conducted itself.
The SFO and the Kazakh mining group said on Tuesday in London’s High Court that the case, which was due to go to trial this week, had been settled for an undisclosed amount.
The dispute concerned whether the prosecutor leaked information to the media during a decade-long corruption probe into ENRC, which the SFO has strongly denied.
It is part of a series of legal complaints made by ENRC since 2017, which alleged its own lawyer colluded with the SFO to fuel the prosecutor’s investigation, as well as claiming that the agency leaked information about the case to the media.
A court ruled last year that the SFO was “in serious breach of its own duties” in the way it handled the case, which pitched the much-criticised UK government agency against a former UK-listed company owned by wealthy oligarchs.
The SFO could still have to pay hundreds of millions of pounds in damages to ENRC. The SFO had set aside £237.7mn to cover legal costs, two-and-a-half times its annual budget. ENRC is seeking about £250mn from the SFO and its former law firm, Dechert.
A separate trial to determine how much the SFO will have to pay ENRC is pending.
The SFO opened its investigation into ENRC in 2013, and was handed extra funding from the government for the probe, but closed it last year citing “insufficient admissible evidence to prosecute”.
Read the full article here