Today the Serious Fraud Office dropped a decade-old corruption case against former executives at London Mining PLC and their alleged ‘fixer’, exposing new problems with the agency’s legacy disclosure software and triggering a review of 20 other cases.
The miner’s former CEO Graeme Hossie, former CFO Rachel Rhodes and consultant Ariel Armon were charged in 2023 with conspiring to make corrupt payments to a public official in Sierra Leone to secure favourable iron ore mining deals. The London-listed company went into administration in 2014 after withdrawing from the troubled Marampa Mine in Sierra Leone.
Today the Southwark Crown Court was told that following a careful review of the case, the Director of the SFO concluded there is no longer a realistic prospect of conviction and would offer no evidence on both counts in respect of all three defendants. This comes after the specialist prosecutor discovered almost 600,000 items had been missed when using its old e-discovery software, Autonomy, of which 19,000 needed to be reviewed for disclosure.
The discovery of this latest problem with its legacy disclosure systems has not only brought an abrupt end to a major prosecution in the run up to trial, but also prompted the SFO to revisit 20 other cases that may have been affected. This will be a further drain on SFO resources and could have potentially huge consequences for other high-stakes cases.
Disclosure has long been an albatross around the SFO’s neck. Given the legacy of disclosure issues from failed SFO prosecutions in Serco, G4S and Unaoil, there are real questions to be asked about how this has happened again. The disclosure glitch was not only missed in the SFO’s own review but also comes despite HMCPSI giving the agency a thumbs up on disclosure in April 2024, saying it had a “robust system with sufficient checks” while “case team vigilance in reviewing the material obtained will ensure no evidence bags are overlooked” or “go missing”.
While the SFO has taken steps to strengthen its disclosure processes in the last couple of years, the collapse of the London Mining case – 10 years after the investigation was opened – is a damning indictment that more needs to be done to futureproof its casework.
Both the Independent Review of Disclosure and Fraud Offences conducted by Jonathan Fisher KC and the Independent Review of the Criminal Courts by Sir Brian Leveson outline that disclosure in the digital age has reached mammoth proportions and must be reformed. Sir Brian highlights that in 2017 the SFO was handling an average of around six million documents for one case, whilst their biggest live case in January 2025 involved around 48 million documents.
The SFO must come clean on what it discovers in its further review of cold cases, but the collapse of London Mining also underscores the urgency of reforms. The government needs to take decisive action to ensure the disclosure regime is fit for purpose in our digital age. These reforms will need to be delivered at pace after the government publishes its full response to the Fisher review in May 2026.
Fixing these problems for good will require reforms to streamline the disclosure process but must be coupled with sustained investment in disclosure capabilities and technology at the SFO. Crucially, this must include investment in proper training and better support to make the most of these tools, recognising that technology is not infallible or a silver bullet for disclosure challenges.
This setback has come when the SFO is at a critical juncture, navigating a change in leadership while the government plans a major overhaul of policing. The specialist prosecutor will need a safe pair of hands during this transition, backed by a strong political commitment to sustain and resource the agency’s vital mandate to prosecute complex corporate corruption.
