Writing in NLJ this week, Chris Roberts, partner and head of white-collar crime and investigations at Grosvenor Law, assesses proposals for deferred prosecution agreements (DPAs) for individuals, ring-fencing DPA proceeds for criminal justice, and rewarding whistleblowers. He questions whether an individual DPA regime would answer the accountability gap created when companies settle but executives avoid conviction—or instead allow defendants to ‘buy their way out of jail’.
Ring-fencing proceeds is more straightforward: major corporate settlements have generated hundreds of millions of pounds while courts and enforcement agencies remain under strain. A statutory whistleblower scheme also has strong evidence behind it, but needs safeguards against false reporting and retaliation, plus substantial resources to assess intelligence. Roberts concludes: ‘What unites all three… is not principle but capacity.’
