PARLIAMENTARY WRITTEN QUESTION
Freezing Orders (10 June 2014)

To ask the Attorney General, with reference to the Answer of 6 May 2014, Official Report, column 8W, on freezing orders, for each of the restraint orders granted since 2010-11, what the length of time was between receipt by the prosecution agency of the freezing request and the granting of the order.

Asked by:
Emily Thornberry (Labour)

Since 2010-11 the Serious Fraud Office has obtained two restraint orders for overseas jurisdictions. The length of time from date of receipt of the requests to the granting of the orders, are shown in the following table;

Year	Time
2010	3 days
2011	7 days

The length of time between receipt of freezing requests by the Crown prosecution Service and the granting of the order is shown in the table below. There were two cases (one in 2010/11 and one in 2012/13) which took a significant amount of time to execute as detailed work needed to be done with the requesting country in order to prepare the applications for restraint orders.

Year	Number of overseas restraint orders	Number of days from the receipt of the external request to the granting of the order
2010/11	7	Request 1 – 22 Request 2 – 96 Request 3 – 9 Request 4 – 17 Request 5 – 17 Request 6 – 95 Request 7 – 645
2011/12	2	Request 1 – 1 Request 2 – 26
2012/13	6	Request 1 – 27 Request 2 – 39 Request 3 – 438 Request 4 – 34 Request 5 – 28 Request 6 – 11
2013/14	3	Request 1 – 16 Request 2 – 1 Request 3 – 35

Answered by:
Sir Oliver Heald (Conservative)
17 June 2014