SFO director faces review as judge criticises ‘flattering’ text messages
The Serious Fraud Office (SFO) is to conduct a review into its director’s behaviour after a judge accused her of falling for “flattery”.
Lisa Osofsky, a former US FBI lawyer, had exchanged emails and texts with David Tinsley, an American private investigator, who was acting for three members of the Ahsani family, which ran Monaco-based oil consultancy Unaoil.
The judge, Martin Beddoe, said that Ms Osofsky, as well as other senior SFO members, should not have had any contact with the investigator, who was seeking more favourable sentences for his clients and had no legal role in the case.
The allegations against her were made public on Monday as it was revealed that two former oil executives were convicted for bribing officials as part of a bid to win lucrative contracts in post-war Iraq.
Ziad Akle, 45, a manager at Unaoil, and Stephen Whiteley, 65, an executive at Dutch oil company SBM, were found guilty of paying bribes worth more than $500,000 (£397,000) to secure a $55m deal in the troubled Middle Eastern country following the ousting of Saddam Hussein.
The convictions at Southwark crown court follow a sprawling three-year investigation into illegal payments made by Unaoil and will be a boon for the prosecutor after a string of high-profile failures.
Akle and Whitely were ensnared in what has been described as one of the biggest corporate bribery schemes in history, centred on Monaco-based oil and gas consultancy Unaoil and involving law enforcement agencies in Australia, the US and the Netherlands.
Unaoil was founded by British businessman Ata Ahsani in 1990 and run by his two sons Cyrus and Saman, who last year admitted bribery in the US.
They spent 17 years paying officials in the Middle East, Africa and Asia to help the business and its major oil and gas clients win lucrative contracts.
The company is said to have overseen a raft of bribes that stretched from Kazakhstan to Iran, threading together a complex web of secret deals and backhanders to local officials in exchange for lucrative oil deals as part of a scandal which has already engulfed international businesses such as Rolls-Royce and oil services firm Halliburton.
The two Ahsani brothers took advantage of poor, often lawless countries rich in natural resources and offered their services to companies interested in winning contracts in these places.
SFO bosses will hope the result eases pressure for reform after they failed to secure convictions in major cases such as a Tesco accounting scandal and 2008 fundraising by Barclays.
