“People can judge me on whatever basis they like” – departing SFO director David Green says final farewell
The view of Trafalgar Square surrounding David Green’s office is one he will miss. The departing director of the Serious Fraud Office (SFO) has enjoyed the architecture for the six years that he has been in, and reshaped, the role that has attracted – perhaps surprisingly – a fair amount of political drama.
Green has been the face of this organisation while it has gone through its fair share of scrapes and scares. When he took over from his predecessor, Richard Alderman, the regulator was dismissed as toothless, lacking in bite and, on a more technical level, incredibly slow at prosecuting the fraud and bribery cases it relied on to shore up its credibility.
Green now finds himself seeing out the last week of his contract. His immediate plans are to take four months off, before he “parades himself around the bazaars of the legal world in the hope of registering a flicker of interest”. Reports suggest he is on track to earn himself a handsome six-figure salary at a top US law firm; a decent antidote to the slog he has carried out in the government department that pays him £180,000 year.
Read more: SFO finally announces Mark Thompson as interim director
The government salary has been referred to as the principal reason why his interim successor was only announced on Tuesday, after a number of delays. The SFO’s appointment of chief operating officer and non-lawyer Mark Thompson confirmed the rumours among legal circles that the SFO had not had a good time finding someone to fill Green’s shoes, and prompted suggestions that without a real figurehead, the future of the SFO could be plunged into further doubt.
The future of the SFO has been a constant theme during Green’s tenure. Much of his time as director has been spent defending the agency’s right to exist. Theresa May has made repeated calls for it to be scrapped and rolled into the National Crime Agency, barely disguising the fact that she did not consider it strong enough to warrant its own agenda. It was only a disastrous election result that forced her relegate the plans to the bottom of her in-tray.
However, as he prepares to pass on the baton to Thompson, Green insists that any uncertainty that existed around the SFO’s future is now over.
“There was a great deal of discussion about it and the home secretary said in no uncertain terms that the SFO would continue as an independent organisation,” he says. “The emphasis is now on better co-ordination and making sure the right cases go to the right people. We don’t want orphaned cases.”
The question will be whether Thompson, and eventually a long-term successor, will be able to continue Green’s mission, which was to toughen the agency’s enforcement. He himself says that after six years, the SFO was “put back to what it was meant to be – an organisation doing the most difficult top tier serious and complex fraud and bribery”.
One such “blockbuster” case attached to Green’s legacy is the ongoing prosecution of a number of UK and EU traders for manipulating the benchmarks by which global interest rates were hedged, the London Interbank Offered Rate (Libor) and the Euro Interbank Offered Rate (Euribor) respectively, at the height of the financial crisis.
The trials have not been short of scandals. The most damaging for the SFO was a comment from a judge that said its decision to call on a not-so-expert witness who texted for help had turned into an “embarrassing debacle” for the SFO, and caused some to question whether the traders had received a fair trial.
The most high-profile defendant, Tom Hayes, is currently having his case reviewed by the criminal cases review commission.
When Green took up the post in 2012, he told a parliamentary committee that he imagined that Libor would be the very benchmark by which he, as director, would be judged.
Has he been found wanting? “It’s not for me to decide what people use to judge my time as director, but I would hope that any assessment looks at the whole picture beyond any single case in isolation.
“Looking back it’s one of several things that people might judge me on, but they can judge me on whatever basis they like. I don’t care.”
He references the conviction of Hayes and four Barclays traders, as well as the guilty plea from Christian Bittar, a former star trader with Deutsche Bank in the Euribor case.
“Christian Bittar pleaded guilty, and that’s hugely significant as it gives lie to the base suggestion that the only people being convicted are office boys,” he says. “Christian Bittar earned €19m euros in 2009. We go after the evidence as investigators, and then we go after the people to whom the evidence points. They may be very senior, they may be very junior. You are dealing with the evidence. It’s a rational process.”
The lengthy investigations that span several directors have led to theories that incoming directors inherit and bear the burden of their predecessors’s mistakes.
For Green, the biggest mistake his successor could make is to “dumb down” the Deferred Prosecution Agreement (DPA) brand that he has consistently emphasised as one of the SFO’s most significant achievements and which has seen companies such as Rolls Royce agree to cough up £497m to avoid criminal charges.
“I wouldn’t dream of dictating anything to my successor,” he says. “I just hope that the level of enforcement remains the same or increases and that the integrity of the DPA brand is maintained and isn’t dumbed down. I think that would be a significant failure.”
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