The director of the Serious Fraud Office is fighting for her job after judges overturned a bribery conviction and accused the agency of a “serious failure” which had prevented a fair trial.
Lisa Osofsky is facing an independent review and questions from her boss, the Attorney General Suella Braverman, after the Court of Appeal quashed the conviction of a former oil and gas executive following backroom talks she held with a fixer.
Senior judges said the SFO had denied Ziad Akle a fair trial by withholding documents that were “embarrassing” to prosecutors after the meetings, which they said were clearly inappropriate.
Mr Akle, 46, was handed a five-year jail term last year after being found guilty of conspiring to bribe an Iraqi official to secure an oil deal.
But after he appealed, a cache of documents was released detailing meetings between Ms Osofsky and SFO officials with David Tinsley, who had offered to help them put Mr Akle behind bars.
Mr Tinsely, a former US Drug Enforcement Agency agent who claimed to know one of Osofsky’s former colleagues, worked for the Ahsani family, whose business Unaoil employed Mr Akle.
He offered to help secure guilty pleas from Ackle and another defendant – even though he did not represent them – in exchange for a more lenient deal for his clients.
The Ahsanis had been the SFO’s prime suspects and have since pleaded guilty to bribery in the US.
When the case came to trial, the SFO failed to properly disclose documents related to its engagement with Mr Tinsley.
Appeal judges said on Friday that this “significantly handicapped the defence”.
They said: “That failure was particularly regrettable given that some of the documents had a clear potential to embarrass the SFO in their prosecution of this case.”
The judges added that Mr Tinsely was “the last person” the SFO should have been dealing with and they “simply [did] not understand” why officials had engaged.
They said there was no evidence that officials had attempted a cover up but that “nothing has been put forward” to justify the decision not to disclose the documents.
The judges added: “The refusal to provide them was a serious failure by the SFO to comply with their duty.
“Akle did not have a fair trial.”
Mrs Braverman has now ordered an independent review of the SFO’s actions and called on Osofsky to explain the fiasco.
Her spokesman added: “The Attorney General is deeply concerned about the findings in the judgement and will be discussing the implications with the director of the Serious Fraud Office urgently.”
Meanwhile Mr Akle’s lawyers have called on Ms Osofsky to resign.
A spokesman for legal firm Paul Hastings said: “If the SFO is to survive then her position is untenable following this judgement.”
The appeal ruling is a fresh blow to the SFO, raising questions about other convictions related to the case as well the organisation’s wider future.
Its prosecution of former Unaoil executives had been a rare success in recent years after separate cases against Tesco, former Serco executives and former Barclays executives unravelled.
The SFO was almost folded into the National Crime Agency (NCA) when Theresa May was Home Secretary, a plan that was later scrapped.
Lloydette Bai-Marrow, a former prosecutor for the SFO and Crown Prosecution Service, said the blunders, from Osofsky’s meetings with the fixer to the refusal to release documents were “unheard of”.
She said: “The SFO is full of good people trying to do a difficult but important job with limited resources.
“There are incredible pressures with a case like this and sometimes those pressures can lead to bad judgement calls.
“Unfortunately, this case is going to do significant damage to the organisation’s reputation and the trust that people place in it.”
