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R (Greyhound Board of Great Britain Ltd) v Welsh Ministers [2026] EWHC 670 (Admin) What are the practical implications of this case? The ruling reinforces the constitutional divide between the courts and the legislature. It explains that the scheme and framework of the Government of Wales Act 2006 (GWA 2006) embody that separation of powers, and that any judicial attempt to recognise and enforce a common law obligation on Welsh Ministers to consult prior to introducing legislation in the Senedd would trespass upon that boundary. This is not a departure from established principle; case law has already upheld comparable rules for lawmakers in Scotland and at Westminster. However, this is the first express confirmation of the position for Welsh lawmakers, and the first time this dimension of the GWA 2006 has been analysed in such depth. The court examined earlier
The solution arrived through the United Nations Compensation Commission (UNCC), a quasi‑judicial body handling mass claims, created under UN Security Council Resolution 687. By addressing environmental harm—most notably via its ‘F4’ claim class—the UNCC set a seminal benchmark shaping how international law and contemporary arbitral panels allocate financial responsibility for wartime ecological devastation. With present-day wars in areas such as Eastern Europe and the Middle East bringing dam breaches, strikes on chemical facilities, and the burning of farmland, the UNCC’s legacy endures as an essential reference point for states, global investors, and companies engaged in post‑conflict arbitration. The F4 claims: Quantifying the unquantifiable Prior to the 1990s, mechanisms in international law for war reparations overwhelmingly favoured property loss, foregone earnings, and bodily injury. The natural world was commonly treated as a mute, non-compensable victim of armed hostilities...
Understanding the farming business as a business Many farms still use long-standing structures that arose by habit, not strategy. Sole traders, informal partnerships and outdated partnership deeds are common. While once effective, such setups can cause major issues around succession, tax planning and involving the next generation. A corporate team can take a fresh, business-led view of the farm, asking: Who owns the land and other critical assets? Who manages daily operations? Who carries the risk and who enjoys the return? What is the enduring plan for succession? From this review, the team can confirm whether the current setup is fit for purpose or if an alternative — for example an updated partnership agreement, a company, a limited liability partnership, or a blended model — would better meet the family’s aims. Tax efficiency through joined-up advice Tax sits at the centre of most
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In December 2023, the Home Office unveiled fresh steps to address the nation’s economic crime challenge, featuring tighter cooperation between government and business. Under the plan, the NCA will be granted authority to ‘direct’ the SFO to assume responsibility for cases involving fraud, bribery, and corruption. This reform will be implemented via an amendment to the UK’s Crime and Courts Act 2013, as set out......
In this issue: Brexit Legal privilege in criminal cases Criminal procedure and evidence Appeal and judicial review Sentencing Bribery, corruption, sanctions and export controls Consumer protection and cartels Corporate liability Cybercrime and data protection offences Environmental offences Financial services and pensions offences Fraud, forgery, tax and theft offences Health and safety and corporate manslaughter offences Insolvency and Companies Act offences Local authority prosecutions Lex Talk®Corporate Crime: a Lexis®Nexis community Daily and weekly news alerts New and updated content Dates for your diary Trackers Useful information Brexit Retained EU Law ( Revocation and Reform) Act 2023 ( Consequential Provision) Regulations 2024 SI 2024/80: Exercising powers granted by the Retained EU Law ( Revocation and Reform) Act 2023 ( REUL( RR) A 2023) in the context of...
Code of Practice investigations Research by a law firm indicates HMRC initiated 1,091 Code of Practice investigations between April 2022 and March 2023, in addition to 3,300 active cases continuing from previous years. Pinsent Masons tax manager, Sophie Warren, said the volume of serious tax investigations opened by HMRC shows the extent of its clampdown on the most serious tax evasion and avoidance. According to the firm, investigations fall into two categories: COP9 is launched in selected instances where HMRC suspects tax fraud. COP8 focuses on suspected tax avoidance. From April 2022 to March 2023, HMRC commenced 417 COP9 investigations and 674 COP8 civil investigations......
Phillips v The Secretary of State for Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Affairs [2024] EWHC 32 ( Admin), [2024] All ER ( D) 49 ( Jan) What are the practical implications of this case? This ruling is among a number of recent first-instance judgments in which the Administrative Court has scrutinised the lawfulness of sanctions listings made under the Russia ( Sanctions) ( EU Exit) Regulations 2019, SI 2019/855 (the Russia Regulations). The broad approach the court ought to take to claims of this kind was the focus of submissions before the Court of Appeal in Shvidler v Secretary of State for Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Affairs, at a hearing held between 17–19 January 2024, where judgment remains reserved. Until the Court of Appeal delivers its decision, practitioners must look to these first-instance decisions for direction. The ruling in Phillips also examines aspects of the legal...
In this issue: Investigating criminal conduct Criminal procedure and evidence Bribery, corruption, sanctions and export controls Consumer protection and cartels Cybercrime and data protection offences Environmental offences Financial services and pensions offences Fraud, forgery, tax and theft offences Health and safety and corporate manslaughter offences Insolvency offences and Companies Act offences Local authority prosecutions Money laundering Corporate Crime in Scotland International Daily and weekly news alerts New and updated content Dates for your diary Trackers Useful information Investigating criminal conduct UK fraud watchdog backs broader powers to compel company information from firms Proposals allowing investigators to demand company information before they are formally under investigation have been endorsed by the UK’s anti-fraud authority, which has welcomed these wider powers. See News Analysis: UK fraud agency welcomes wider powers to force information from companies. Criminal procedure and evidence Post Office Horizon prosecutions Following the Post Office scandal, the UK government’s plan to review the rules on private prosecutions could undermine victims’ ability to pursue criminal cases via this...
Second only in size in the UK to the 2020 global Airbus SE corruption settlement, Entain has acknowledged the corporate offence of failing to prevent bribery as part of a deferred prosecution agreement ( DPA). It accepts the alleged shortcomings arising from previous GVC Holdings management missteps. Under the DPA announced on 5 December 2023, the package includes Entain’s agreement to cover HMRC and CPS investigation costs of £10m and to make a £20m charitable payment. Entain is also required to cooperate fully and in good faith with the CPS on any and all matters linked to the conduct at the centre of the underlying allegations, and to take all reasonable steps to implement revisions to its ethics and compliance programme where required. This article outlines the UK’s DPA framework and sets out practical learning points for companies facing...
But what happens when the criminal property is only a fraction of the sums held in an account? Case law has meant that, even where only a small portion of an account is tainted, the entire balance had to be frozen, an outcome widely seen as unfair. Parliament has now remedied this through the Economic Crime and Corporate Transparency Act 2023 ( ECCTA 2023). Section 183 of the ECCTA 2023, ' Money laundering: exemptions for mixed-property transactions', took effect on 15 January 2024. It revises the POCA 2002 provisions that set out the principal money laundering offences. The change introduces an exemption for regulated firms that maintain a client account or hold client funds while knowing or suspecting that only part of the funds or property is criminal. In those circumstances, the regulated firm may carry out transactions on the account or property...
The Post Office Horizon scandal stands as a stark case of private prosecutions going awry. How did this happen? Between 1999 and 2015, hundreds of self-employed Post Office workers (sub-postmasters) were wrongly taken to court for false accounting, theft and fraud. The accusations stemmed from defects in Horizon, the accounting system supplied by Fujitsu. Horizon appeared to show cash missing from branch accounts—but the funds had not vanished. While some were imprisoned, bankrupted, stripped of their contracts or saw their personal lives fall apart, the Post Office maintained for years that nothing was amiss with Horizon’s data. From the early 2000s, however, the system was erroneously flagging shortfalls at individual branches. In 2009, Computer Weekly reported claims that Horizon was flawed and highlighted prosecutions of sub-postmasters. The Post Office began to look into the issues, yet in 2015 the then chief executive, Paula Vennells, told a...
FEPA FEPA is a landmark statute that, for the first time in US history, criminalises foreign officials who solicit or receive bribes in return for carrying out an official act to secure a commercial benefit. It applies where a foreign official seeks or takes bribes from issuers or domestic concerns, or from any person whilst the official is in the US. Enacted with bipartisan, bicameral backing, the law grants federal prosecutors expansive extraterritorial authority to pursue corrupt foreign officials who demand or accept bribes. For decades, the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act ( FCPA) was the only foreign bribery regime, and it addresses the supply side of misconduct—ie, paying or offering bribes to public officials to gain a business advantage. Yet the FCPA does not authorise prosecutors to charge the other participant in a quid pro quo-style bribery scheme—the...
What impact do you consider the new Failure to Prevent fraud offence and expansion of corporate criminal liability for economic crimes will have for businesses and the lawyers advising them? The new Failure to Prevent ( FTP) fraud offence is intended to embed a culture of stronger fraud prevention within organisations, echoing the FTP bribery regime. Set out in section 199 of the Economic Crime and Corporate Transparency Act 2023 ( ECCTA 2023), it applies to ‘relevant bodies’ where an ‘associate’ commits fraud to benefit the relevant body or ‘any person to whom, or to whose subsidiary undertaking, the associate provides services on behalf of the relevant body’... The scope surpasses section 7 of the Bribery Act 2010 ( BA 2010). Those automatically treated as ‘associates’ include employees, agents and subsidiaries; this also covers employees of subsidiaries and any individual performing services for or on the...
Ministers are reviewing the framework of rules for bringing private prosecutions as anger mounts over the Post Office’s pursuit of blameless sub‑postmasters for theft and false accounting, an episode widely seen as among the gravest miscarriages of justice in UK legal history. Although no proposals have yet been set out, boutique practices and City lawyers who specialise in private prosecutions are uneasy, monitoring events closely, amid concerns that the backlash could inflict unintended harm. Polly Sprenger, a former Serious Fraud Office ( SFO) investigator and now a partner at Addleshaw Goddard LLP, warned that a sweeping reaction against private prosecutions risks throwing the baby out with the bathwater if change is rushed. Jonathan Rogers, a University of Cambridge professor and co‑deputy director of the Cambridge Centre for Criminal Justice, suggested ministers will still wait to consider the ongoing public inquiry’s...
The Serious Fraud Office ( SFO) From 15 January 2024, the Economic Crime and Corporate Transparency Act 2023 confers fresh powers on the SFO, enabling it to require suspected fraudsters and businesses to provide material relevant to enquiries. Before this shift, the agency could obtain corporate evidence without launching a formal investigation in overseas bribery and corruption matters. The reforms now broaden that ability, applying it to fraud, as well as to domestic bribery and corruption cases......
In this issue: Criminal procedure and evidence Proceeds of crime Appeal and judicial review Sentencing Bribery, corruption, sanctions and export controls Cybercrime and data protection offences Environmental offences Health and safety and corporate manslaughter offences Corporate Crime in Scotland International Daily and weekly news alerts New and updated content Dates for your diary Trackers Useful information Criminal procedure and evidence BCS urges review of law of reliability on computer evidence The British Computer Society ( BCS) has called for a rethink of the rule that presumes computer-based evidence is reliable, in the wake of the Post Office scandal which resulted in over 700 convictions of sub-postmasters founded on computer data. BCS wants the legal presumption that computer systems’ data are always accurate—and that the prosecution has no burden to prove this—to be...
The Environment Agency has announced that it has blocked access to an apparent illegal waste site in Ashford, Kent, to prevent further alleged illegal tipping the authority stated......
At Southwark Crown Court, Judge David Tomlinson stated he will hand down a suspended custodial sentence to Kamlesh Vaghjiani in two months’ time, after the former pharmaceutical entrepreneur admitted falsifying data provided to the regulator during the licensing of a thyroid medicine. Prosecutors said Vaghjiani, 55, exaggerated the shelf-life of Evotrox — marketed by Kappin Ltd, the company he controlled — to obtain permission from the Medicines and Healthcare products Regulatory Agency to market three versions of the drug in 2006. Tomlinson J also ordered Kappin to pay the fine, as the company had exploited the misleading information to become the first to sell a liquid form of the thyroid treatment. The company was given 28 days to pay. Tomlinson J added that he would levy a 'substantial' fine on Vaghjiani. The recommended sentence and confiscation order were agreed between the defendant and...
What are the main proposed provisions and what impact will they have? The contains the following provisions: Clause 1: Mandatory whole life orders Murder attracts a life sentence. The court must either determine a minimum term to be served before release can be considered, or, where the seriousness demands it, rule that release can never occur by imposing a whole life order ( WLO). At present, Schedule 21, paragraph 2(1) of the Sentencing Act 2020 ( SA 2020) identifies categories of murder for which the starting point is a WLO. Clause 1 introduces a statutory duty, consistent with other minimum sentence regimes, to impose a WLO in the most serious instances unless exceptional circumstances justify a different outcome. In addition, Clause 1(2)(b) provides that a murder involving sexual or sadistic conduct triggers that duty to make a WLO; by contrast, the current SA 2020,...
A Lewes Crown Court judge in East Sussex has ordered 45-year-old Christopher Bilmes to hand over £3,300 in criminal proceedings, following claims by the former clients of the ex-solicitor that £3.9m was owed, a Crown Prosecution Service ( CPS) spokesperson confirmed. The CPS said Bilmes, jailed during April 2023 for four years and eight months, has three months to pay up......
At Southwark Crown Court, Judge Christopher Hehir sentenced the man for bribing former Metropolitan Police sergeant Frank Partridge from 2014 to 2015, using dinners in Soho, central London, and a paid resort holiday to Morocco. Hehir J further directed the man, who cannot be named and was absent from the hearing, to meet £40,000 of the prosecution’s legal costs. Partridge had been jailed by the same judge in July 2023 for seven and a half years. He was castigated for his ‘wholesale corruption’ after taking inducements, among them tickets to see the heavy metal band Metallica and bespoke tailoredclaims. Calling the bribery network a ‘stramash’—a Scottish expression for a disturbance, Hehir J noted that Partridge had already been accepting bribes before he encountered the man; yet that did not render the conduct any less grave, he said. This was, he...
Lawyers and legal academics have warned that the government plans to enact speedy justice for the victims of the Post Office Horizon scandal risk usurping the judicial function of the courts in deciding guilt. Emergency legislation to be sped through Parliament will overturn the convictions of hundreds of sub-postmasters prosecuted on the basis of misleading Horizon computer evidence between 1999 and 2015. Public clamour for rapid justice has mounted further since the ITV dramatisation of the saga, ' Mr. Bates vs the Post Office', rekindled criticism that only a small proportion of the wrongful convictions had been quashed on appeal. However, lawyers and commentators caution that the government’s push for haste is exceptional and misaligned with UK constitutional principles. Steve Foster, a professor who has taught public law at Coventry University in Central England for 46 years, argued that by setting aside the...
Funds intended to compensate more than 200 victims were recovered from convicted fraudster Jeffrey Revell- Reade after the sale of his waterfront property in Sydney, Australia, on 10 January 2024, according to the SFO. The Australian national was handed a prison term of over nine years in 2014, having been found guilty of cheating investors out of £70m through the sale of worthless shares. In 2018, a judge added a further four years to his sentence when he failed to pay in full a £7.5m confiscation order......
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When evaluating a general damages claim, the practitioner ought initially to refer to the Judicial College Guidelines (JCG)...
This Practice Note This Practice Note reviews mechanisms used in settling litigation. A Tomlin order consists of a consent order paired with a schedule. It operates to stay proceedings on terms that have been agreed. The provisions contained in the schedule may remain confidential. This Practice Note describes the scope of confidentiality attaching to the schedule and sets out how it differs from a standard consent order. Sample wording for a Tomlin order is included, alongside links to precedents, as well as guidance on court approval. It also addresses varying, setting aside and enforcing a Tomlin order, including the considerations the court will take into account when handling applications for each. Further guidance is provided on interpreting and applying the relevant provisions of the CPR; however, some courts and divisions impose very specific requirements for both drafting and approval, and for approaching the schedule and confidentiality issues. Accordingly, you must consider the particular rules and court guide provisions in the forum where your claim is proceeding when drawing up the Tomlin order...
Date [ date ] Parties [ name of Landlord ] [ of OR incorporated in England and Wales (company registration number [ number ]) with its registered office at ] [ address ] (Landlord) [ name of Tenant ] [ of OR incorporated in England and Wales (company registration number [ number ]) with its registered office at ] [ address ] (Tenant) [ [ name of Guarantor ] [ of OR incorporated in England and Wales (company registration number [ number ]) with its registered office at ] [ address ] (Guarantor) ] [ [ name of Mortgagee ] [ of OR incorporated in England and Wales (company registration number [ number ]) with its registered office at ] [ address ] (Mortgagee) ] Definitions Within this Deed, the terms below shall be interpreted as follows: [ Annual Rent • the annual sum reserved under the Lease; ] [ Insurance Rent • the Tenant’s share of the Landlord’s costs of insuring the Property (as set out in the Lease); ] Lease • the lease of the Property dated [ date ], entered into between (1) [ the Landlord OR [ name ...
I, [ name ], of [ address ], solemnly and sincerely state that: [ Matters to be verified, set out in numbered paragraphs ] I make this solemn statement in good conscience, believing it to be true, and pursuant to the provisions of the Statutory Declarations Act 1835. DECLARED at [ details ] this [ day ] day of [ month and year ] Before me ................................................................................ [ signature of the person before whom the declaration is made ] A [ commissioner for oaths OR [ solicitor OR [ insert other qualification ] ] authorised to administer oaths ]...
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