The Serious Fraud Office is within weeks of bringing criminal prosecutions against individuals caught up in the Rolls-Royce bribery scandal, one of the biggest corruption cases in British corporate history.
The SFO has confirmed that it is carrying out criminal investigations of former Rolls employees and others, believed to be the middlemen through which the aircraft engine maker paid more than $100 million in bribes to government officials and companies in a dozen countries across five continents. It is understood that charges could be made by Easter.
The fraud office declined to confirm or deny whether Sir John Rose and John Rishton, two former chief executives of Rolls-Royce, were among the individuals under investigation.
In a judgment that laid bare 25 years of bribery and corruption, Sir Brian Leveson revealed that the SFO expected to bring criminal prosecutions against individuals. He said that there had been “the most serious breaches of criminal law in the areas of bribery and corruption (some of which implicated senior management and, on the face of it, controlling minds of the company)”.
He added that evidence handed over to the fraud office “included written reports revealing further corruption indications and a report concerning conduct Rolls-Royce had known about since 2010 and previously (under different leadership) decided not to notify.”
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Sir John was chief executive from 1996 to March 2011, covering most of the time that bribery and corrupt practices are said to have taken place. He is now the chairman of Hakluyt, the intelligence agency founded by former MI6 officers.
Mr Rishton replaced Sir John, having previously sat on the Rolls board as a non-executive director from 2007. At the time of his appointment, the company’s chairman at the time, Sir Simon Robertson, said that Mr Rishton had “a deep understanding of Rolls-Royce”. Mr Rishton left Rolls in 2015 and is now a non-executive director at Unilever.
Legal papers in Britain and in the United States show corruption as late as 2013 in countries around the world.
Sir John and Mr Rishton did not respond to attempts by The Times to contact them. Rolls-Royce declined to comment.
Sir Brian’s judgment said that “in excess of 100 key employees or former employees” had come under investigation from the fraud office. It revealed that Rolls-Royce had taken disciplinary action against 38 of its employees. Of those, six were dismissed and a further 11 left during investigation. The other 21 “suffered sanction short of dismissal”.
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Rolls-Royce agreed to an out-of-court settlement, in which it is to pay penalties totalling £671 million. It has to pay £13 million to the SFO and has already spent £138 million on advisers and compliance programmes.