Former Met Police chief appointed head of UK’s Serious Fraud Office

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A former senior Metropolitan Police chief has been appointed as the new head of the UK’s Serious Fraud Office at a time when it faces heightened scrutiny over a series of failed prosecutions.

Nick Ephgrave, who was assistant commissioner of the Metropolitan Police in charge of frontline policing between 2019 and 2022, will take over as SFO director in September when Lisa Osofsky, a dual US-UK citizen, steps down, the attorney-general’s office announced on Wednesday.

He served with the Met for most of his 32-year policing career, which included a six-year spell at Surrey Police, where he was promoted to chief constable in 2015.

Earlier this year, the Met was the subject of a damning review by Baroness Louise Casey, who recommended that the UK’s largest police force should be broken up if it could not fix a number of serious failings

Jonathan Pickworth, head of the London investigations and white collar defence practice at law firm Paul Hastings, said Ephgrave was a “good appointment”, adding: “The SFO is at rock bottom and needs to rediscover its purpose,” he said.

Ephgrave said he was “honoured” to take over at the top of the agency. “I look forward to building on its recent successes and driving forward work to deliver long-lasting improvements to its operations.”

Ephgrave’s appointment brings to an end a mixed tenure for Osofsky who has seen some successes under her watch but also some high profile failures at an agency that has struggled with a limited budget and resourcing issues, including the retention of lawyers and IT experts.

Under Osofsky, the agency secured a number of high profile deferred prosecution agreements with companies to bring criminal prosecutions to an end. These included a record €991mn corporate settlement in 2020 with Airbus to settle a joint corruption probe with France and the US.

Following an SFO probe, Glencore Energy UK was ordered to pay £276.4mn last year by a court after it admitted seven counts of bribery between 2011 and 2016.

Osofsky’s tenure was marred by a number of controversies, notably failings in the SFO’s disclosure processes, which led to several criminal trials being abandoned. Disclosure is an important issue in white collar crime prosecutions, which rely heavily on documentary evidence, and antiquated rules have made it harder to deal with the growing number of electronic communications, such as emails.

In March, the SFO abandoned a criminal prosecution of three former executives at G4S, the security company, who had been accused of defrauding the government over a prisoner-tagging contract, due to disclosure problems almost a decade after the case began.

In 2021, the SFO also oversaw the collapse of another trial related to prisoner tagging against two former Serco executives collapse after the agency failed to hand key documents to the defence teams.

“The immediate challenge for the new director will be to ensure that disclosure ceases being an albatross around the SFO’s neck,” said Neil Swift, partner at law firm Peters & Peters.

Other controversies on Osofsky’s watch included the SFO’s probe into Unaoil, the energy consultancy, which prompted then attorney-general Suella Braverman to launch an independent inquiry that found “fundamental failures” at the agency. The courts ultimately quashed convictions of three defendants in the Unaoil case.

Ephgrave’s police background differentiates him from recent incumbents at the top of the SFO.

“The last two directors have been lawyers with prosecutorial backgrounds. As a police officer, one imagines that Ephgrave’s principal experience will lie in the investigation of offences, rather than taking them through the courts,” said David Rundle, white collar partner at law firm BCLP.