Pragmatic justice – deferred prosecution agreements take shape

Interminable, costly fraud trials, collapsing under the weight of their own complexity and ennui of jurors, exhausted defendants and memory-taxed witnesses, may, finally, be left behind if the Government’s plans for Deferred Prosecution Agreements (DPAs) are accepted.

Timon Molloy, Editor

In a consultation issued on 17 May 2012 [1], the Ministry of Justice admits that commercial organisations currently have little incentive to self-report wrongdoing, as the Serious Fraud Office (SFO) had hoped under the Bribery Act 2010, while criminal prosecution remains a real possibility. At the same time, prosecutors face an uphill struggle in making charges stick when, as is common in large businesses, decision-making is diffused and the ‘directing mind and will’ is so far removed from the offence. The consultation paper notes that even when a case is brought, a late guilty plea will rack up a bill for the SFO of around UK£1.6 million after some eight years’ work.