Deferred Prosecution Agreements: Lessons From Serco

BCL partner Harry Travers and senior associate Alex Swan's article, 'Deferred prosecution agreements: lessons from Serco' has been published by Solicitors Journal.

Here's an extract from the article:

"Recent commentary on DPAs have focussed on a few key themes: an alleged lack of judicial scrutiny in the approval hearings (apparently evident from the swiftness of the process); the fact that judgments have become progressively shorter; and the non-publication of hearing transcripts. Perhaps the real question is: "what has been scrutinised?", to which the answer appears to be "whether the company should be avoiding prosecution or paying a bigger financial penalty given the agreed facts." There has been no judicial consideration at all of whether the SoF is justified by the evidence, and in particular whether the evidence justified an agreed 'fact' that an individual (who is not a party to the DPA proceedings) had committed a criminal offence. Whilst a DPA does