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Lexology Panoramic: Government Investigations 2025

22 July 2024

BCL's Michael Drury and Tom McNeill have published the chapter on Government Investigations for Lexology Panoramic.

What government agencies are principally responsible for the enforcement of civil and criminal laws and regulations applicable to businesses?

The agencies primarily responsible for the enforcement of civil and criminal laws and regulations applicable to businesses are as follows:

  • the Serious Fraud Office (SFO);
  • the Financial Conduct Authority (FCA);
  • the Competition and Markets Authority (CMA);
  • His Majesty’s Revenue & Customs (HMRC);
  • the Insolvency Service, which is an executive agency of the Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy; and
  • the Crown Prosecution Service (CPS), which is the principal prosecuting agency in England and Wales.

There are also other agencies with responsibilities outside the central areas of financial crime (fraud, bribery and corruption, money laundering, market abuse, etc) where there may be large-scale corporate investigations, including in relation to the environment, health and safety and other 'regulatory' areas where similar issues arise.

Can multiple government entities simultaneously investigate the same target business? Must they coordinate their investigations? May they share information obtained from the target and on what terms?

Agencies can and do work together and there are statutory ‘gateways’ allowing information to be shared. By way of example, a target business may be the subject of SFO investigation in relation to fraud offences while simultaneously being under investigation by the FCA for regulatory breaches arising from the same conduct.

Generally, if an agency is conducting a criminal investigation, this tends to take precedence over any civil or regulatory investigation (but there is no statutory impediment to criminal and regulatory actions, or civil proceedings for that matter, continuing in parallel).

The extent to which agencies will investigate together and share information is dependent on their particular memoranda of agreement, but there are frequently used statutory gateways that also permit such exchanges.

Panoramic (formerly Getting the Deal Through) is a panoramic view of how laws and regulations vary across jurisdictions from the market-leading cross-jurisdictional comparison tool. Lexology allows users to drill down into the content, directly compare law and regulation between jurisdictions and create tailored reports in seconds.

This guide was last updated on Lexology Panoramic on 5 June 2024. If you wish to read the full guide please click here (Lexology Login Required).

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