Unlock the Editor’s Digest for free
Roula Khalaf, Editor of the FT, selects her favourite stories in this weekly newsletter.
The UK Serious Fraud Office and Eurasian Natural Resources Corporation have given themselves 24 hours to settle a dispute over the agency’s conduct during a probe into the Kazakh mining group.
ENRC’s civil trial against the SFO, which was due to start on Monday, has been put on hold for a day while the settlement talks take place.
The lawsuit is one part of a legal battle waged by ENRC against the agency over its conduct during the 10-year probe, which has left the SFO on the hook for potentially millions of pounds in costs.
This latest dispute concerns whether the SFO leaked information to the media during its investigation into alleged corruption at ENRC, which the agency has strongly denied. The case involves two former senior employees at the SFO and the trial was due to run for seven weeks.
The SFO and ENRC confirmed on Monday that the settlement discussions were taking place but declined to comment further.
The parties will update the court on Tuesday as to whether an agreement has been reached, with the trial set to resume as planned if negotiations fail.
The dispute adds to a list of problems for the agency, which has struggled to get on the front foot in recent years after previous director Lisa Osofsky saw several convictions quashed over failings by the prosecutor, and closed a number of high-profile investigations.
Director Nick Ephgrave, a former police officer who took up the helm a year ago, is attempting to rebuild the agency by using more investigative techniques borrowed from policing and filling the agency’s high number of vacancies.
London’s High Court has already found the SFO liable for mis-steps in the ENRC case that led to unnecessary costs for the Kazakh group.
The agency set aside £237.7mn to cover legal costs linked to the ENRC litigation in its latest set of accounts. The mining group had been seeking as much as $1bn in costs and lost revenue from the criminal probe, though in a ruling in December, Mr Justice David Waksman indicated the damages would not be “as much as ENRC has sought”.
The SFO opened its investigation into ENRC in 2013 but closed it last year citing “insufficient admissible evidence to prosecute”.