UK Serious Fraud Office agrees six figure settlement with ex Unaoil prosecutor

The head of the UK Serious Fraud Office (SFO) will pay around 300,000 pounds ($378,630.00) to a former prosecutor who was wrongfully fired while leading a high-profile bribery investigation, sources familiar with the case said on Monday. The settlement comes one day before Tom Martin, who led the British part of a global bribery investigation into the once-prominent Ahsani family and their Monaco-based energy consultancy Unaoil, was due to fight for compensation in a London court.

The head of the UK Serious Fraud Office (SFO) will pay around 300,000 pounds ($378,630.00) to a former prosecutor who was wrongfully fired while leading a high-profile bribery investigation, sources familiar with the case said on Monday.

The settlement comes one day before Tom Martin, who led the British part of a global bribery investigation into the once-prominent Ahsani family and their Monaco-based energy consultancy Unaoil, was due to fight for compensation in a London court. Martin was dismissed for gross misconduct in 2018 after being accused of swearing at an FBI agent in a London pub two years previously.

An employment tribunal, however, ruled in 2021 that the U.S. Department of Justice and the Ahsanis wanted to remove him from the Unaoil case and thwart the SFO's attempts to extradite Saman Ahsani, a key suspect, to Britain from Rome in 2018. "On behalf of the SFO, I apologise for the upset caused to you and your family by what the employment tribunal found to be the wrongful and unfair termination of your employment," SFO director Lisa Osofsky said in a statement, which did not specify the settlement amount.

The investigation into Unaoil, which fixed billions of dollars of energy contracts in post-occupation Iraq, strained Anglo-U.S. relations and left the SFO tarnished. Disclosure failures and Osofsky's personal contacts with an Ahsani agent - as U.S. and British prosecutors wrestled over prime suspects - sparked rebukes from a judge, a government-ordered review and led to three convictions being overturned.

Osofsky on Monday pledged to improve the way the agency handled external complaints of staff behaviour by suspects and defendants and to ensure the SFO's suspension and disciplinary policies followed best practice. "I am pleased that this episode is now over and that, after four very difficult years, the SFO has finally accepted that the findings it made against me were wrong both in fact and in law," Martin said in a statement.

British-Iranian brothers Cyrus and Saman Ahsani, Unaoil's former CEO and chief operating officer, pleaded guilty in the U.S. in 2019 to being part of a multimillion-dollar bribery scam to help major Western companies win energy projects in the Middle East, Central Asia and Africa over two decades. ($1 = 0.7923 pounds)