The Serious Fraud Office : a political history

Abstract

This study offers an analysis of the history of the Serious Fraud Office (SFO). More specifically it aims to establish a dialogue between the operation of the SFO and its social context. Within this broad objective it attempts to answer four questions. The first asks why the SFO was created in 1987. The second concerns the extent to which the SFO has expanded the scope of commercial fraud prosecution. The third relates to the degree of correspondence between the SFO's operation, in terms of the types of cases it prosecutes, and its representation in the news media. And the fourth involves an examination of the limits of commercial fraud prosecution after the Guinness and Blue Arrow cases. These questions are designed to illuminate the conditions which were necessary for the state to mobilise its criminal justice apparatus against commercial fraud, the extent of that mobilisation, its ideological dimensions and its fragile and contingent nature.

The study is based on extensive field work in the SFO, including a systematic examination of its files. It attempts to combine this rich source of data with an analysis of the SFO as an institution.

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