“In 1986 the Economist reported that recent scandals had “raised doubts abroad that the City of London is the most honest place to do business”. Lord Roskill, the senior judge Margaret Thatcher’s government appointed to examine the state of fraud in the UK, agreed. ‘While petty frauds, clumsily committed, are likely to be detected and punished, it is all too likely that the largest and most cleverly executed crimes escape unpunished’, his commission reported.”
That is in line with a Czech proverb: the big thieves hang the small ones.
“The harder and more complex the investigations it [the Serious Fraud Office] takes on, the more it is fulfilling its mission – and the likelier it is to fail.”
“Having ruled that the agency mistreated the Trio’s corporate empire [ENRC/Eurasian Natural Resources Corporation], a judge will now decide how much UK taxpayers’ money should be paid to the oligarchs’ company in damages. The SFO has set aside a quarter of a billion pounds.”
“On 24 August 2023, 10 years after it opened the criminal investigation, the SFO announced that it had closed the ENRC case. It blamed ‘insufficient admissible evidence to prosecute’ in the case of alleged bribery in Congo. There was no mention of the investigation into the possible laundering of the proceeds from the alleged Kongoni fraud.”
“ENRC cases have reached some of the highest courts in the land. In one important ruling, the court of appeal blocked the SFO from gaining access to the work Neil Gerrard had done investigating ENRC, strengthening the legal privilege that shields a corporation’s inquiries into suspected crime from scrutiny by the authorities.
The Trio and their corporation feature extensively in Kleptopia, my book about how dirty money is conquering the world.
It is hard to avoid the conclusion that the ENRC saga has been settled by force of money. Plenty of people have made lots of it: lawyers on all sides, City bankers, PRs, private spies and peers, not to mention the oligarchs, who retain their global mining empire. During the SFO investigation, ENRC’s accounts show that the Trio’s corporation spent nearly half a billion dollars on ‘professional fees and other exceptional litigation costs’ as it brought legal actions against those who crossed it.
The losers, by contrast, are those who can least afford it. If money was stolen from a FTSE-100 company, the investors who are poorer as a result probably include many pensioners. If bribes were paid to those who run Congo, that helped entrench the kleptocracy that condemns generations of Congolese to privation and predatory rule. If Hanna and the Trio embezzled some of the $295m ENRC paid for Kongoni, that would suggest a big tax bill has gone unpaid in South Africa, where public services have all but collapsed. Meanwhile, in the UK, taxpayers are on the hook for the misconduct of SFO bosses.”
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