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 settled a dispute over the agency’s conduct in its criminal probe of the Kazakh mining group, bringing an end to a key element of their years-long battle.
The SFO and ENRC said on Tuesday in London’s High Court that the case, which was due to go to trial this week, had been settled for an undisclosed amount.
The legal battle concerned whether the prosecutor leaked information to the media during its decade-long corruption probe into ENRC, which the SFO has strongly denied.
While the settlement resolves one part of the dispute, the SFO could still have to pay millions of pounds in damages to ENRC after it was found liable in December for mis-steps in the case that led to unnecessary costs for the mining group.
The probe into ENRC, which the SFO abandoned last year, led to highly damaging findings about the way the agency conducted itself, resulting in an ignominious end to the high-profile investigation.
The SFO set aside £237.7mn in its accounts this year to cover legal costs linked to the ENRC litigation. The mining group had been seeking as much as $1bn in costs and lost revenue from the criminal probe.
A separate trial to determine how much the SFO will have to pay ENRC is pending.
The SFO opened its investigation into ENRC in 2013 but closed it last year citing “insufficient admissible evidence to prosecute”.
This is a developing story
