Today’s post looks at the recent headlines garnered by the (relatively) massive fines being given to serious corporate players by the Serious Fraud Office (SFO) in the U.K. This marks a drastic change in approach, as we shall see, and that may be down to the adoption of an American creation known as a ‘Deferred Prosecution Agreement’ (hereafter DPA), which has already been discussed in Financial Regulation Matters . The focus of the post is to show how the SFO is becoming a genuinely powerful and influential regulator for the financial sector and, ultimately, that it must be supported in its endeavours, because of its capabilities to reduce transgressions via the only (unfortunately) palatable form of correction. The SFO has been in the business headlines recently because of a number of high-profile agreements that have been reached under the possibilities afforded by the adoption of the DPA. A DPA became a tool for the SFO in the U.K. in 2014, and was introduced to the arsenal ...