Jurisdiction(s):
United Kingdom

Serious Fraud Office GC: disclosure IT glitches not undermining convictions; triaged review, transparency, and drive for faster charging, whistleblowing rewards, UWOs and DPA enforcement

Published on: 24 February 2025

Published by a Law360 reporter

Legal News

Article summary

Wagstaff, 53, accepted that defence solicitors are uneasy about the process. Speaking to Law360 at the SFO’s offices overlooking Trafalgar Square, he said issues with the agency’s legacy software — which missed potentially relevant material the SFO was legally bound to disclose to defendants in court cases — have produced more smoke than fire. He added that the review’s findings so far are heartening and that the SFO has not, as yet, found anything that would call the safety of any conviction into question to date. The agency began the review — the latest disclosure setback — in 2024, after revealing it was fixing an encoding fault in its newer system, OpenTextAxcelerate software. Behind closed doors, and at times in open forum, publicly, defence lawyers have wondered whether the agency has minimised the scale of the technical problems. Flaws in the former platform, Autonomy Introspect, which failed to recognise full stops and colons, helped bring down the SFO’s case against ex-executives at security group G4S. That prosecution faltered after defence teams challenged why certain documents the agency was duty-bound to disclose had not been handed over as required...

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