Christopher Houssemayne du Boulay in LSG on Serious Fraud Office’s “uncertain future”
27 May 2026
Business Crime partner Christopher Houssemayne du Boulay has been quoted in a Law Society Gazette article on the “uncertain future” of the Serious Fraud Office.
Christopher addresses various issues in the wide-ranging feature, including the agency’s trajectory since Nick Ephgrave took over as director in 2023.
“If you compare some of the large companies and multi-million-pound international bribery allegations that the SFO was investigating historically, there seems to have been a scaling back of ambitions more recently”, Christopher tells journalist Maria Shahid.
Later in the article he explains how low prosecutorial ambitions may create a negative “feedback cycle” which changes the way companies engage with the agency.
“If the SFO is not considered a competent, effective prosecutor, then there is a disincentive for large companies to self-report, because companies will calculate the negatives and positives of
reporting misconduct.
“If the consequence of self-reporting is that ultimately, in 10 years, they will enter into a DPA and pay several million pounds, and still have had a decade of investigation, it’s not hard to imagine how that really does create a disincentive to self-report.”
Read the full article here.
