The Financial Services Authority has dismissed mounting concern about its broadening remit as a criminal prosecutor, following a surge in the number of cases brought by the ­regulator.

Former City lawyer Margaret Cole (pictured), the FSA’s director of enforcement, addressed the issue in a speech last Thursday to the British Bankers Association. She was speaking after lawyers raised concern about a recent Court of Appeal ruling that the regulator can prosecute for money laundering – even though parliament did not give it that power – because otherwise there would have to be a separate trial brought by a different agency for those offences.

The court said that in such cases the FSA could prosecute as a ‘private individual’, raising fears that the FSA could prosecute for potentially any offence in this capacity.

Alluding to a current ‘hot topic’ in the criminal fraud arena – ‘who should be prosecuting what’ – Cole said: ‘We were accused recently of having transformed ourselves into an assertive criminal prosecutor – something I took as a compliment until I saw it was qualified by the statement that this had happened in the absence of public debate. Our credentials for prosecuting have also been questioned, although I am not sure how seriously, on the basis that we are not superintended by the attorney general, lack the powers some other prosecutors have, and are not funded by the public purse.

‘It is not clear what the basis for these propositions is, since the original statutory provisions which underpin the prosecution powers (and their funding) were debated in parliament in 2000, the FSA is accountable to parliament through the Treasury, judicial approval has recently been given to the FSA’s prosecutorial actions and I have been articulating the FSA’s prosecution policy over the last three years, in response to which there have been no discernible dissenting voices.’