LONDON (Within The Law) - A former prosecutor for the Serious Fraud Office is currently suing the regulator for unfair dismissal after he was sacked after an altercation in a pub. However, at stake in the tribunal is the question of whether the US derailed a major fraud investigation and colluded with the suspect to settle their own scores.
Tom Martin had been in charge of the Serious Fraud Office’s high-profile investigation of oil and gas consultancy Unaoil over bribery charges. However, he was sacked in December 2018 just over a year and a half after he allegedly swore at an FBI agent in a London pub.
The altercation came at a time when relations between the UK and US regulators were not good. Both the US Department of Justice and SFO were engaged in a tug of war over who would get to prosecute Saman Ahsani, a member of the firm’s founding family, over bribery offenses.
The UK has planned to try him for bribery offenses in the UK after the Government’s top lawyer gave the go-ahead. However, before the UK agency could request his extradition from Italy, the US swooped in and approached him to see if he would do agree to negotiate a plea bargain
According to communications within the SFO, the organisation felt betrayed by the DOJ who had led them to believe they only wanted to maintain a ‘watching brief’ and would give the UK a clear run to make a prosecution. The SFO is said to have shared a ‘significant’ amount of evidence with the DOJ unaware that the DOJ was planning to go behind their back and offer the suspect the opportunity to choose where he was tried.
In an email to his DOJ counterpart, senior SGO officer Alun Milford wrote that the move “has gone down very badly across our senior management team. People want to know when/if they can trust the DoJ.”
As the Guardian revealed in July, the incident sparked an increasingly tense series of emails between senior officials within the SFO and DoJ with the latter appearing to threaten to withdraw cooperation on other cases, in response to the SFO’s complaints.
The Americans asked the SFO to step back from the investigation on the basis that they felt they had a better chance of persuading Ahsani to implicate other individuals. However, a senior SFO official Matthew Wagstaff stated that the Attorney General was not willing to withdraw his approval of the prosecution.
He warned that the DOJ’s conduct risked causing harm to ongoing cooperation between the two agencies. It was then that the DOJ replied with what appeared to be a threat to suspend cooperation.
“As you figure out what this means for the broader relationship, we will press pause on our other cases so that you can let us know how you want to proceed,” came the reply.
These tensions appear to have spilled over in a London pub at informal drinks which were ironically meant to smooth relations between the two teams. Here, Martin is said to have called an FBI agent a ‘spy,’ a ‘quisling’ and another well known English word which rhymes with ‘shunt’.
Against the wishes of the DOJ, the SFO investigation continued and received additional funding from the government reserved for major investigations.
Differing approaches
The tensions stemmed from differences in the way the two agencies wanted to approach the investigation. US investigators were less interested in the Ahsanis who they regarded as middlemen and more interested in Unaoil’s major corporate clients.
The SFO, meanwhile, was more interested in going after those parties which were most directly responsible. They could not recommend leniency for the Ahsanis without the cooperation and even then the decision was not in their hands. It would all be down to a judge’s discretion.
The choice for the Ashanis was pretty clear and their lawyers got to work fending off the SFO and directing them down the course of cooperation with the DOJ. In a complex series of diplomatic maneuvers, the US managed to secure the extradition of Ahsani from Italy to the US.
Now the DOJ stepped up its allegations against Martin in what he claims was a bid to have him removed from the investigation. While the pub altercation had been briefly investigated after an informal complaint at the time, the DOJ submitted a series of complaints about Martin’s conduct including the highly unusual step of passing a complaint by Ahsani about Martin onto the SFO.
In a tribunal, the SFO said the incident represents ‘unacceptable abuse on a personal level’ and fired Mr. Martin. However, he is now suing the SFO for unfair dismissal and argues that there had been a ‘conspiracy between the Department of Justice and the Ahsanis in order to destabilise the SFO’s case and get him removed.’
The SFO’s decision to remove him, he said, was ‘not a neutral act’ and was part of attempts to mend bridges with the US regulator.
Speaking in its defence the SFO has admitted the poor state of relations between the two organisations but has described Martin’s claims of a conspiracy as being ‘fanciful’.
“His behaviour stands on its own two feet,” said Tony Osbaldiston, a non-executive director of the SFO who conducted the investigation ‘and even if it was raised [by Ahsani’s lawyer and the DOJ] in the hope it might remove him from the scene it was still unacceptable behaviour.”
Saman Ahsani, along with his brother Cyrus pleaded guilty to bribery in the US last year but are yet to be sentenced.
(Written by Tom Cropper, Edited by Klaudia Fior)