The CPS said it has prosecuted 10,000 economic crime cases in the past financial year and warned the scale of fraud is growing, with £479m lost in bank transfer scams in 2020. It said 96% of fraud is cyber enabled.
The CPS strategy includes supporting the creation of the first economic crime court and the use of more Nightingale courts for fraud cases, recovering the proceeds of crime and seeking compensation for victims where possible, and supporting more virtual hearings for economic crime cases to help reduce the backlog.
Max Hill, director of public prosecutions, said: ‘This is a serious and growing area of criminality, which is why we have developed a focused plan to help combat it, providing more resources for specialist economic crime prosecutors, working closer with the police to build strong cases from the outset and giving victims confidence to come forward.’
However, David Corker, partner at Corker Binning, said: ‘Such a specialist court would rupture the system for the trial of all serious criminal cases which has existed since the Crown Court was invented in the early 1970s.
‘Crown Courts have since then been the sole judicial tribunal for the trial of all prosecutions brought on an indictment.’
Corker said similar proposals had been made before but had foundered mainly because of opposition from the judiciary who argued crimes should be treated the same. He said ‘two-tier justice would make it appear that there are ordinary criminals and economic crime ones which is not only wrong but also socially divisive.
He said: ‘It is a pity that the CPS did not boldly propose amending the requirement that all trials on indictment must be determined by a jury.
‘That it shied away from permitting an accused to choose whether to be tried by judge-alone or a jury as in the situation for example in Canada, New Zealand and most of Australia.’
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