Corruption is a Crime

The Law Lords have finally ruled on the Serious Fraud Office’s appeal against the High Court’s decision in April that the SFO acted unlawfully in ending its investigation into the Al-Yamamah arms deal.

The House of Lords has overturned that decision and declared that the director of the SFO acted lawfully and within his powers when he ended the inquiry.

On the fact of it, this is disappointing. But the real issue is not whether the SFO acted unlawfully - it’s the political pressure apparently put on the SFO by ministers, and the reasons behind the decision to drop the investigation. That’s why we’re continuing to campaign for an independent inquiry into how and why the Serious Fraud Office’s investigation was ended.

And there are some interesting comments from the Law Lords in this regard, as the BBC reports:

Baroness Hale said she would have liked to have been able to uphold the court’s decision that the SFO’s director acted unlawfully because it was “extremely distasteful that an independent public official should feel himself obliged to give way to threats of any sort”.
[...]
Lord Bingham, said the SFO director Robert Wardle “was confronted by an ugly and obviously unwelcome threat”.

The nature and source of those threats still need to be exposed.

The UK Government has failed to modernise and toughen anti-corruption laws. It withdrew its own Corruption Bill and hasn’t backed reforms proposed by Transparency International.

Writing in The Times, lawyer Jeremy Summers criticises the Government’s failures on corruption.

But Britain’s enforcement record, in sharp contrast, remains poor. Already reeling from the decision to halt the BAE Systems al-Yamamah investigation, it recently suffered another setback when the Government was forced to withdraw its Corruption Bill in a state of disarray.

Remarkably, the Government has also refused to support an alternative and far more workable Corruption Bill proposed by the leading international antibribery body, Transparency International (TI). Instead, it has asked the Law Commission to propose alternative legislation, with the effect that any new law is unlikely to be in force until 2009 at the earliest.

The UK’s anticorruption legislation, which has remained largely unchanged since 1916, was essentially formulated to deal with the then principal evil, corruption in public office. But the pace and international nature of commerce has changed dramatically and it is universally accepted that new legislation to tackle modern-day corruption is needed.

The article goes on to tell how the latest attempts to reform the law have stalled, concluding:

Many now argue persuasively that the perception of political interference in the al-Yamamah decision has greatly compromised the Government’s position on corruption.

The full ramifications of that decision remain to be seen, but in the interim the failure to bring in new legislation – even though a respected independent body has provided credible way forward – does the Government little credit.

Read the full article here.