The Serious Fraud Office’s (SFO’s) recent decision to abandon its formal investigation into Mott MacDonald, the UK construction company accused of corruption in Lesotho, because there was no real prospect of a conviction, makes it clearer than ever that reform of our legislation on bribery and corruption is required as a matter of urgency.
Campaigners are increasingly accusing the Government of complacency. In the light of the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) Convention on Combating Corruption of Foreign Public Officials (signed by the UK in 1997), the Law Commission concluded in its 1998 report, Legislating the Criminal Code: Corruption, that the current law is “obscure, complex, inconsistent and insufficiently comprehensive” and recommended its replacement with a single modern Corruption Act. A White Paper was published in 2000 and a draft Bill emerged in 2003. It was heavily criticised. There was another consultation between December 2005 and March 2006, before the Bill was later dropped by the Government.
