NBR on SFO

Ben Thomas in the NBR covers the announcement that the Serious Fraud Office is being wound up and amalgamated into a new Organised Crime Agency. Ben notes:

The decision to disestablish the SFO appears to have been taken swiftly: only three months ago, advertisements appeared for a replacement for the SFO’s outgoing director, David Bradshaw, and it received a big funding boost in May’s budget.

But now the minister in charge of the SFO, Michael Cullen, is suggesting that the connection between organized crime and fraud is too complex for the SFO to handle.

This is the reverse of the usual argument that serious and complex fraud is too specialized for the police. 

Like Ben, I am skeptical of this move.  I think an Organised Crime Agency is a very good thing, but whether the SFO should be part of that is another matter.

A decade ago I would have been insistent you can’t touch the SFO – it had almost a 100% conviction rate.  But in recent years it has had several high profile failures and confidence in it has been lessened.