£15M WASTED — AND LIVES WRECKED
FIVE hours. That’s all it took for a jury to acquit a group of former Barclays Bank executives, after a trial which the Serious Fraud Office had spent seven years and an estimated £15 million preparing.
Last week’s debacle was the latest in a series of colossally expensive humiliations for the SFO (after one failure recently, it had to pay damages to the defendants).
But this was the highestprofile because it was the only one that related to the collapse of the British banking sector in the credit crunch of 2008. It was also the most bizarre, as the SFO had gone after the one bank which refused to take British taxpayers’ money for a bail-out.
Barclays had raised the funds in Qatar, but, according to the SFO, had done this by paying a secret ‘bung’ of over £300 m to the Qataris.
The jury decided otherwise. They might also have wondered, as many months of their lives passed in an Old Bailey courtroom, what on earth the public interest was in such a prosecution, and who the victims of this alleged crime could be?
But the SFO, uniquely, has the absolute right to decide whether a prosecution is ‘in the public interest’: and the basis for this decision is a secret unto itself.
I happened to meet one of the three defendants a few days before his acquittal. Richard Boath, now 61, was at the sharp end of the Qatari transaction, and tapes of him expressing concerns about the deal were the key to the prosecution case.
But as he explained to me, it had been cleared by Barclays’ team of in-house lawyers — none of whom the SFO chose to prosecute.
Boath looked haggard as he told me that the past seven years of investigations had had a profound impact on his health and home life, including the collapse of his marriage. He had also lost his job at Barclays, although the bank had funded his defence.
But he was admirable in his lack of self-pity. ‘People won’t feel sorry for me, as a well-off banker, and I don’t mind that at all,’ he told me.
‘What I do mind is that the SFO behaves with an arrogance and stupidity that has long needed checking.’ And what of the now departed SFO chief behind this and other failures? David Green QC was rewarded with a knighthood.