BRITAIN’S Serious Fraud Office has reached a settlement with Kazakh miner ENRC, closing a lawsuit accusing the agency and law firm Dechert of inflicting substantial financial harm during a bribery investigation, Reuters reports.
The deal, disclosed by ENRC and Dechert on Wednesday, appears to draw a line under litigation stretching back more than a decade. The SFO had examined claims that ENRC paid bribes to win mining contracts in the Democratic Republic of Congo between 2009 and 2012, allegations the company always rejected, Reuters said.
London’s High Court had already ruled that the SFO would not have launched its probe without first persuading Neil Gerrard, then ENRC’s lawyer at Dechert, to work against his client’s interests.
Matthew Wagstaff, the SFO’s director of legal services, said the agency was “confident that the SFO’s wrongdoing between 2011 and 2013 could never happen again,” calling it “a fundamentally different organisation.”
The regulator dropped its case against ENRC in 2023 without charges, citing insufficient admissible evidence.
ENRC, once a FTSE 100 constituent, had sought about $76m in costs blamed on the probe, and $90m in higher borrowing costs after it became public. The SFO and Dechert had contested the claims, with a damages hearing held earlier this year, said Reuters.
A verdict never came. The parties confirmed on Wednesday that terms had been agreed, without disclosing figures. Gerrard’s lawyer did not respond to a request for comment.
A related ENRC suit over alleged leaks to journalists was settled in 2024, said the newswire.
