PARLIAMENTARY WRITTEN QUESTION
Serious Fraud Office (24 June 2014)

To ask the Attorney General, how many (a) investigations were carried out, (b) individuals were charged, (c) corporates were charged, (d) criminal prosecutions were launched and (e) criminal convictions were secured by the Serious Fraud Office in (i) 2012-13 and (ii) each of the five preceding years.

Asked by:
Emily Thornberry (Labour)

11 convictions were secured in 2013/14 and 16 prosecutions were completed in 2013/14 (including those with convictions).

The Serious Fraud Office (SFO) investigates and, where appropriate, prosecutes cases of serious or complex fraud (including cases of domestic or overseas bribery and corruption) which, in the opinion of the Director of the SFO, call for the multi-disciplinary approach and legislative powers available to the SFO. Since April 2012, the SFO’s caseload has been recalibrated so that it is taking on fewer and more complex cases, as envisaged by the Roskill model.

The SFO’s Intelligence Unit will assess all matters referred to the SFO whether by the public, the police or other agencies or organisations and refer those considered suitable for acceptance to a Case Evaluation Board before submission to the Director for his decision to open a criminal investigation under the Criminal Justice Act 1987.

SFO investigations are complex, and this can sometimes lead to investigations merging or splitting into different parts. For instance, the Libor investigation is into numerous financial institutions, and there are other large investigations which have been subdivided.

The information requested for earlier years is contained in the following table.

	2012/13	2011/12	2010/11	2009/10	2008/09	2007/08
Number of investigations opened	8	10	13	17	20	18
Number of individuals charged	18	24	25	57	31	20
Number of corporates charged	0	0	1	2	0	1
Number of convictions secured	14	39	23	24	33	17
Number of prosecutions completed by defendant (including those convicted)	20	54	28	26	54	25

Note 1: Two cases have been opened, closed, and then re-opened. These have been counted only once in the data above.

Note 2: Prior to April 2012 the SFO did not collate all of its casework data centrally and it is therefore possible that some records form this period may not have been identified. The SFO is currently carrying out a project to ensure that its reporting systems are more robust in the future.

Answered by:
Sir Robert Buckland (Conservative)
1 September 2014