Attorney General launches 'forensic' review of Unaoil failings

The Attorney General has appointed a former director of public prosecutions to investigate the Serious Fraud Office’s handling of the Unaoil bribery scandal.

David Calvert-Smith, a retired High Court judge, will lead the review before reporting his findings back to Suella Braverman by the end of May.

The government said the review would focus on "what went wrong" in the Unaoil case, and what changes are needed at the SFO "to ensure that the failings identified in the judgement cannot happen again, especially in relation to contact with third parties and disclosure".

Braverman first announced plans to investigate the SFO in December, when the Court of Appeal quashed the conviction of Ziad Akle, a former executive at the Monaco-based oil and gas consultancy.

He was given a five-year prison term in 2020 for conspiring to bribe an Iraqi official to secure a $55m oil deal following the fall of Saddam Hussein in 2003.

But in a highly critical judgement, the Court of Appeal ruled Akle had not had a fair trial after the SFO failed in its disclosure duties and "handicapped the defence". The SFO’s request for a retrial was also denied.

Unaoil was at the centre of a complex investigation into corruption that spanned multiple countries and agencies. The SFO launched its own inquiry in 2016, while in the US, two members of the Ahsani family, which founded Unaoil, have struck plea bargains. British-Iranian brothers Cyrus and Saman Ahsani, Unaoil’s former chief executive and chief operating officer respectively, pleaded guilty in 2019 to being part of a scheme to bribe government officials across nine countries, but have yet to be sentenced.

Their father, Ata Ahsani, paid a $2.25m fine and faced no further action.

The SFO secured a total of four convictions. Basil Al Jarah pleaded guilty in 2019, while Akle, former colleague Stephen Whiteley and Paul Bond, a former sales manager at SBM Offshore, were convicted in 2020 and 2021. Bond announced he would appeal his conviction following the Court of Appeal’s ruling in December.

In a statement on Wednesday, Braverman said: "We must ensure lessons are learned so that the failings we saw in the Unaoil case can never happen again.

"I am confident [Calvert-Smith] will be forensic and robust."

The SFO told Reuters it welcomed Calvert-Smith’s appointment and would cooperate fully.