SFO chasing lawyers

The Serious Fraud Office wants to recruit more lawyers next year after almost doubling its quota in the past 12 months, which also marked a highly successful year.The SFO took on 17 lawyers in the last year.

It now has 38 lawyers.Its annual report, released last week, records 24 cases completed last year - the average over the previous four years' was 14 - and convictions in all but one of them.

Four of the cases involved solicitors.Bournemouth solicitor Alan Scott Whittingham pleaded guilty to misusing client funds and was sentenced to two years' imprisonment.

Birmingham solicitor Alan Pritchard received five years for hoodwinking the public into signing green forms in a legal aid fraud.Keith Norman Walton and William Noel Arthur Horner were solicitors who lent 'spurious respectability' to a fraud against company creditors.

Walton got three-and-a-half years, while Horner, who confessed, got 18 months.

In the fourth case, the solicitor was acquitted.Two of the SFO's ongoing cases involve solicitors.

Paul Baxendale-Walker is charged with defrauding a pension fund of 1.6 million, while Birmingham solicitors James Cadwell, David Curley and Richard Hugh Pope are charged with defrauding investors in a bogus capital enhancement programme.Meanwhile, north London solicitor Louis Glatt - who helped to launder millions from alcohol and tobacco smuggling - received six years this week at Southwark Crown Court.

Jeremy Fleming