SFO Director Highlights Difficulty Of Securing Convictions

Director of the Serious Fraud Office Lisa Osofsky used her annual Cambridge Symposium speech to emphasise the importance of international and corporate co-operation, to issue a call to arms for greater legislative assistance to companies in preventing economic crime from occurring and to warn of the difficulty she faces in securing convictions when it does.

International Cooperation

Ms Osofsky has been in her post for a little over a year and has stressed throughout her tenure the importance of corporate co-operation with prosecutors and investigators.¹  So central is co-operation to her approach that it was used as the theme to this year’s Symposium.

As well as reiterating the importance of good relationships between corporations and investigators, Ms Osofsky addressed the need to eliminate communication failure between countries, which she sees as increasingly damaging when evidence in large-scale cases of fraud and corruption is likely to be scattered across