We should never have expected the SFO to bring banks to justice

Friends of former Barclays chief executive John Varley — I don’t mean ‘people who speak to the media on his behalf’, but rather people like me who have known him all our working lives and hold him in high regard — were relieved to hear he has been cleared of fraud charges relating to the bank’s 2008 capital raising from Qatar. Charges against Barclays itself were dropped last year but Varley’s co–defendants Roger Jenkins, Tom Kalaris and Richard Boath now face a retrial — so I’ll say no more for now about the Serious Fraud Office’s handling of this dossier. But it’s fair to ask, in general, how well our criminal justice system has dealt with the ramifications of the financial crisis.

The answer — at least according to the body of popular opinion, echoed by many politicians, that cries ‘lock up the bankers’ — is that it has largely failed and that the SFO, now led by former FBI prosecutor Lisa Osofsky, has repeatedly shown itself unfit for purpose.