I’ll hunt you down
She’s put bent mafia judges behind bars in Chicago. And now the new SFO chief has a message for white collar crooks in Britain...
Fans of hard- hitting american justice have long dreamed of a British system of prosecuting white collar crime with similar venom and a less deferential approach.
Finally, we may have discovered that person in Lisa Osofsky ( pictured), the spirited director of the serious Fraud Office (sFO) who cut her teeth as a young lawyer helping to jail corrupt judges in Chicago who had been quashing mafia murder convictions for $500 backhanders.
When the elegant 56-year-old Osofsky arrived at the sFO in 2018 she was confronted with a caseload which read like a Who’s Who of British business, including Barclays, Glaxosmithkline, RollsRoyce and Tesco.
There was some criticism and shock when she dropped the GsK and RollsRoyce actions. But Osofsky is keen to clear the decks and get on with cases she has a better chance of winning.
‘You have to be practical,’ she says about GsK’s alleged bribery and corruption in China.
‘Good luck getting anything out of China,’ she tells me in an interview at the sFO HQ overlooking Trafalgar square in London. ‘They behead people who have been convicted of corruption. It is a slightly different system to what we have in the UK.’
Her directness in talking about cases could come straight out of the mouth of Paul Giamatti who plays Manhattan attorney Chuck Rhoades in the awardwinning Us TV series Billions.
at Rolls-Royce there had been an expectation that the sFO would go after the ‘controlling mind’ mentioned in the documents when the aerospace champion agreed a deferred prosecution agreement (DPa) with her predecessor David Green. Rolls had agreed to pay a fine of £497.5m after being indicted on 12 counts of bribery and corruption around the world.
Osofsky says bringing the individuals in such cases to court is not as easy as it looks, as it took place over decades. ‘They have to be under 85, that’s a plus, they’ve got to be in my jurisdiction. When it came to individuals, we had a couple of low-level people and it didn’t make sense to prosecute them for the sprawling crime scenario that was painted.’
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importantly, the controlling mind usually has covered any tracks. ‘There is less likely to be the chain of damning emails. People at the top of these organisations don’t get their hands dirty enough with evidence of a sort which would allow us to present a case.’
DPas, where companies are in essence put on probation, are in her view a ‘good weapon, complementary to going after individuals – it’s not either- or. at Tesco we
had one judge who liked Tesco, one judge who didn’t like Tesco. It looked like we were gonna get the individuals the first time round. The guy has a heart attack, our case awaits retrial.’
she acknowledges companies may see DPas as ‘the cheap way out’. she adds: ‘There was a hole in the Tesco accounts and there was corruption at Rolls-Royce. There was an admission of that.’
In spite of cynicism about DPas, where the company and investors suffer rather than individuals, Osofsky believes that they have a hugely important role.
Prior to her arrival, the director had been working at Britain’s biggest and most global bank, HsBC. ‘I just spent five years working on the DPa against HsBC. It got nailed for laundering dope money out of Mexico. It was my job to make sure that they act on money laundering sanctions.’
The mood of the sFO and Osofsky is fairly chipper at present after its success in bringing two more Barclays executives to justice for manipulating interest rates. Colin Bermingham, 62, and Carlo Palombo, 40, were convicted of conspiracy to defraud. They were sentenced to five years and four years in jail respectively.
‘I feel the right thing was done,’ says Osofsky. ‘We had a hardworking jury that stayed with it and brought home the most senior person we had in the ring.’
Does she think that cases like this have a deterrent effect?
‘It does reverberate. I did get feedback from new York and trading floors there.
‘The myth is that these cases are too complicated for juries. The sentences weren’t as strict as some of the blockbuster sentences you might get in a Us court. But four or five years here is fairly substantial for us.’
In spite of the regret that most senior bankers escaped prosecution in the financial crisis, Osofsky says she is proud that the sFO took on Barclays and some senior executives over its Middle Eastern fundraising in the financial crisis.
‘It’s conduct from the time when we were suffering a real financial hit from the banking crisis... we haven’t shirked from these kinds of cases.’
Her journey from Us justice to Britain came via a notorious fraud. In the early 1990s she was working for the Justice Department in Washington and sent to London to work on what she calls the ‘ Bank of Crooks & Criminals International’ – the infamous Bank of Credit & Commerce International (BCCI), which collapsed in 1991 – and seconded to the sFO under director George staple.
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returned to the Us to work as an ethics officer at the FBI before deciding to live and work in the UK, qualifying as a barrister. she then worked at Goldman sachs countering money laundering and offering regulatory advice.
Osofsky thinks it might be easier to make fraud convictions stick if laws that date back to the 1800s were modernised.
One plus emerged from the recent case against natural resources group EnRC. Justice sir Brian Leveson ruled if as a firm ‘you are going to run your own internal investigation, you’d better be willing to give the fruits of that investigation to the sFO if you want to be seen as co-operative’.
Directors of the sFO have talked tough before only to find that it is tricky keeping juries engaged in complicated cases and that judges are not always as knowledgeable and sympathetic as she would like them to be. Osofsky’s straight talking brings a fresh approach to tackling corporate crimes and those who commit them.