The SFO has today announced its 13th deferred prosecution agreement (DPA) with Ultra Electronics Holdings Ltd (formerly Plc) (Ultra) in relation to a failure to prevent bribery. The DPA was approved this afternoon by Mr Justice Hilliard, and follows some eight years after the investigation, which concerned the suspected payment of bribes in Algeria and Oman, was first opened. Under the DPA, Ultra will pay £10 million in penalties, along with £4.8 million in SFO investigative costs. The SFO has now drawn a line under its historic investigation, having confirmed today that it will not be pursuing individual prosecutions in connection with this case.
DPAs have been historically well-utilised by the agency but notably absent from the enforcement landscape in recent years. 12 DPAs were entered into by the SFO between 2014 (when the regime started) and July 2021, yielding £1.7bn in fines and disgorgement. Since this time however, their use has fallen away; Ultra marks the first DPA for the agency in almost five years.
We don’t yet know whether the Ultra DPA signals a change in tide for the SFO. Like many of the DPAs obtained, the investigation into Ultra followed a self-report by the company during the early stages of an internal investigation in 2018. Some speculate that the slow-down in DPAs has been caused by a change in corporate risk appetites in recent years, with companies considering a self-report opting to wait and see whether the SFO’s resources will stretch so far as to uncover the misconduct for itself. The SFO has recently taken steps to reinvigorate the self-reporting regime; in April last year it published guidance which confirmed that corporates who self-report promptly and cooperate with the SFO can expect to be given the opportunity to negotiate a Deferred Prosecution Agreement (DPA) (for more information see our article here). In the background, the SFO has been keen to emphasise the risk of corporates keeping wrongdoing to themselves, highlighting improvements in its evidence gathering abilities and indicating an ambition to prosecute under new offences introduced under the Economic Crime and Corporate Transparency Act 2023. It remains to be seen whether the guidance, coupled with the threat of increased criminal exposure for corporates, has its intended effect.
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