On 16 July 2019, three former employees of Sarclad Limited (Sarclad) were acquitted of conspiracy to corrupt and conspiracy to bribe. This followed a 2016 deferred prosecution agreement (DPA) between Sarclad and the UK Serious Fraud Office (SFO). Cases like this highlight how DPAs, whilst becoming more common, do not always result in individual convictions.
Carl Newman, partner and Rebecca Ridley, solicitor in BDB Pitmans’ white collar crime and investigations team, discuss this at length in an article for the International Compliance Association’s inCOMPLIANCE magazine, explaining:
‘We are left with, in effect, a two-tiered system of justice, whereby evidence used to conclude a DPA is inadequate when scrutinised under a criminal trial of an individual’.
