Jury acquits former Sarclad executives of U.K. SFO bribery charges

UK Serious Fraud Office DPA Bribery

On July 16, a London jury acquitted three former Sarclad executives who had been charged with foreign bribery by the U.K. Serious Fraud Office (SFO). The SFO reportedly failed to prove that the former executives – a managing director, sales head, and project manager – had paid bribes to secure overseas contracts. The acquittal comes three years after Sarclad, a metals industry supplier, entered into the SFO’s second-ever deferred prosecution agreement (DPA). The July 2016 DPA resolved, at a corporate level, some of the same bribery allegations that the executives faced at trial, and resulted in the company paying a £6.5 million fine. Sarclad’s identity in the DPA was not publicly known until restrictions were lifted at the conclusion of the trial.