- Chief Compliance Officer and VP of Legal Affairs, Arrow Electronics
By 
Kyle Brasseur2023-07-20T15:01:00
Recruitment and retention are among the biggest issues facing the U.K. Serious Fraud Office (SFO) as the agency gets set for a new director to take the reins.
The SFO on Tuesday published its annual report for 2022-23, in which outgoing Director Lisa Osofsky balanced praise for the agency’s work against acknowledgement of the areas improvement is needed. Osofsky will leave the SFO in September, when Nick Ephgrave, a former assistant commissioner of London’s Metropolitan Police Service, will take over.
Ephgrave already has a tall task ahead of him in overhauling the SFO’s culture and performance after a pair of independent reviews completed last year shined a spotlight on deficiencies at the agency that led to significant errors in high-profile cases against Unaoil and Serco.
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The U.K. Serious Fraud Office launched an investigation into collapsed law firm Axiom Ince and an estimated £66 million (U.S. $82.5 million) worth of client funds that went missing.
High staff turnover, low morale, and unattractive rates of pay are among the areas legal experts pointed to when discussing the potential agenda of Nick Ephgrave upon taking over as head of the U.K. Serious Fraud Office.
Glencore Energy UK was ordered to pay nearly £281 million (U.S. $314 million) in fines and costs after an investigation by the U.K.’s Serious Fraud Office (SFO) found it paid $29 million in bribes to gain preferential access to oil in Africa to boost profits.
German petrochemical parts supplier Aiotec agreed to pay $14.5 million to settle allegations that it engaged in a four-year conspiracy to dismantle and ship a plastics manufacturing plant owned by a U.S. company to Iran, in violation of U.S. sanctions.
Kiromic BioPharma will pay no fine to the Securities and Exchange Commission after self-reporting that it failed to disclose material information about two cancer drugs to investors.
The U.K. Financial Conduct Authority fined the London branch of Australian-based Macquarie Bank Limited more than 13 million pounds (U.S. $16.3 million) for “serious control failures” that allowed a trader to conceal hundreds of fictitious trades over a 20-month period.
