, Labour’s Shadow
Attorney General, responding to Sir David
Calvert-Smith’s report into the Serious Fraud Office’s handling
of the Unaoil case, said:
“This report lays bare a catalogue of woeful mismanagement and
inexplicable misjudgements at the top of the SFO that allowed the
architects of the Unaoil fraud to escape justice, and stitched up
one of their junior staff to take the fall.
“It is clear that the hard-working investigative staff at the SFO
were repeatedly undermined by senior managers whose combination
of gullibility and arrogance allowed a fixer for the Unaoil
owners to manipulate their management of the case.
“It is vital that the Attorney General not only commits to
implement Sir David’s recommendations in full, but asks herself
whether the senior managers at the SFO whose failures are exposed
in this report are really the individuals best placed to repair
the damage.
"The Attorney General must also take action to change the entire
approach of the SFO, which far too often in recent years has
responded to the discovery of corporate fraud not with a
determination to prosecute those responsible, but to negotiate
deals with them.
“Finally, she should reflect on Sir David’s warning that it is
not a lack of rules that caused this scandal, but the fact that
some key players saw themselves as above those rules. That is the
culture that must be rooted out not just in the SFO, but across
the whole of this wretched government.”
