More jail time for corporate criminals under Fraud Review

Longer prison sentences for fraud and other white collar commercial crime are
recommended in the final report of the government’s Fraud Review.

Solicitor general Mike O’Brien said the government is ‘sympathetic to the
broad conclusions and recommendations’ but recommended wider public consultation
before reaching conclusions.

And attorney general Lord Goldsmith said: ‘We have be better on tackling
fraud.’

The review calls for greater powers for the courts to accept plea bargaining
and for civil, regulatory and criminal proceedings to be dealt with by the same
court to cut costs. It draws on experiences in the US.

Earlier, in an open letter to Lord Goldsmith in the Annual Report of the
Serous Fraud Office, director Robert Wardle called for more resources to close
the ‘uncomfortably wide’ gap between the incidence of fraud and the number of
investigations, ‘let alone prosecutions’.

He said he regretted the failure to implement trial by judge alone in
complicated fraud cases, insisting: ‘There are a few cases, small in number but
of great complexity and difficulty, which are simply no longer amenable to trial
by jury.’