The Serious Fraud Office is to ask parliament to enhance its powers to fight fraudulent companies and corrupt directors, the Gazette has learned. The investigation and prosecution agency has begun consulting privately with senior lawyers and officials before it approaches parliament later in the year. Sources close to the discussions said the SFO wants powers to fine fraudulent companies and impose deferred prosecutions, as well as ­legislation requiring companies to report frauds as soon as they are discovered.

The sources also said that a new power to subpoena company directors to appear before it is under consideration.

The SFO declined to comment.

If granted, the new powers would represent the biggest expansion of the SFO’s authority since its creation in 1988. A legal duty on companies to report frauds would go much further than the current voluntary reporting arrangement. The power to levy fines would go further than the use of civil recovery orders, to which the SFO is currently restricted.

In June last year, a critical report by Jessica de Grazia, a former New York prosecutor, suggested that the SFO align itself more closely with the US fraud prosecuting system.

Introducing a power to subpoena directors, although cited by sources as a ‘remote possibility’, would mark a shift towards US practice. Andrew Cuomo, attorney general for New York, used subpoenas to haul Merrill Lynch executives into his office at the start of March.

SFO director Richard Alderman (pictured) has not publicly stated that he would like the SFO’s powers to be enhanced.

However, at a recent fraud conference, he called attention to the ‘very considerable differences between the powers available to my counterparts in the US to those available to me here’ and said: ‘It is for parliament to consider whether the powers of the SFO are sufficient here or whether more is needed.’