Serious Fraud Office

The Serious Fraud Office (SFO) is the British agency that investigates and prosecutes serious and complex fraud in England, Wales and Northern Ireland. The Kerry-Brown Senate Report described it as "the British version of the financial crimes unit within the Justice Department."¹

BCCI Investigation

According to the Senate report, the Bank of England alerted the SFO to begin an investigation of the Bank of Credit and Commerce International (BCCI) one week after receiving the draft Sandstorm Report of Price Waterhouse on June 22, 1991, four days before the bank's worldwide closure on July 5.² The report recorded that when the office of the Manhattan District Attorney, Robert Morgenthau, sought BCCI documents from the SFO, it "was unwilling to provide it with any assistance," and listed the SFO with BCCI's lawyers, accountants and shareholders, the Bank of England and the Justice Department among the institutions that, "while professing to cooperate with the District Attorney, in fact withheld information." It also found that the investigations of the Federal Reserve had been hampered by the SFO, which prevented it from interviewing certain witnesses and reviewing certain documents in the United Kingdom.¹²

Prosecutions

On September 27, 1993, Syed Ziauddin Ali Akbar, the former head of BCCI's treasury division in London, pleaded guilty at the Old Bailey to sixteen counts of false accounting, and the next day was sentenced to six years, the first criminal conviction arising from BCCI's collapse; an SFO official said no further criminal prosecution of him was planned. Three further BCCI-related trials were then scheduled for January 1994.³

In September 1992 the SFO opened an inquiry into BCCI's loans to the Gulf Group of the Gokal brothers, drawing on records from the London liquidators, Touche Ross, and from Grand Cayman, Abu Dhabi and two New York banks. Abbas Gokal was arrested at Frankfurt in July 1994, extradited, and charged in February 1995; after a trial of 122 days at the Old Bailey he was convicted of conspiracy to account falsely and conspiracy to defraud, and on May 8, 1997, he was sentenced to fourteen years, the heaviest sentence the SFO had then obtained. The trial cost about 10 million pounds.⁴⁵