A review of ‘serious’ disclosure failures by the Serious Fraud Office, which led to two former oil executives’ bribery convictions being overturned, has been delayed by a month, it emerged today.
Sir David Calvert-Smith, director of public prosecutions between 1998 and 2003, was asked to lead an independent review after former Unaoil executive Ziad Akle’s conviction was quashed last year.
Attorney general Suella Braverman appointed the former High Court judge in February to look at what went wrong in the Unaoil case, after the Court of Appeal criticised the SFO for ‘wholly inappropriate’ contacts with a ‘fixer’ as well as ‘serious’ disclosure failures at Akle’s trial.
SFO director Lisa Osofsky and other senior SFO figures had contacts with David Tinsley, a former US Drug Enforcement Administration agent who was acting on behalf of the Ahsani family which owned and controlled Unaoil – which Lord Justice Holroyde said was ‘wholly inappropriate’.
Paul Bond, Akle’s co-defendant who worked for a company called Single Buoy Moorings and was jailed for three-and-a-half years, also had his bribery convicted overturned by the Court of Appeal in March, after which his lawyers said Osofsky’s position is ‘wholly untenable’.
The following week, Osofsky told the House of Commons’ justice committee that she was ‘not in a position to answer anything’ about Bond’s successful appeal as she did not want to ‘impinge on’ Calvert-Smith’s review.
Calvert-Smith initially aimed to report his findings by the end of May, but the Attorney General’s Office today said that he would now report by late June ‘due to unavoidable delays’.
It is understood that he has been unable to gather all of the evidence needed to meet the original deadline, and that the attorney general will inform parliament of his findings and the government’s response before the recess towards the end of July.
