After months of delay, the much-ballyhooed U.K. Bribery Act arrived last summer. But it won’t move mountains without a subtle but seismic change in Britain’s legal superstructure. What the United Kingdom needs is a mechanism to allow leniency for cooperating corporate defendants. Some top enforcement officials apparently agree. The U.K. solicitor general has quietly floated the idea of adopting U.S.–style deferred prosecution agreements. And the Serious Fraud Office (SFO) is lobbying the Home Office and Justice Ministry to push a deferred prosecution bill through Parliament, the Financial Times reported.
“There is a need for a mechanism that allows a strongly ethical company that uncovers an isolated problem, and reports it, to have a reasonable prospect of reaching a just settlement without necessarily being exposed to a criminal sanction,” says Covington & Burling’s Robert Amaee, former head of the U.K. anticorruption unit of the SFO.
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