How oligarchs took on the UK fraud squad – and won | Serious Fraud Office

1: A body, a mine, a mystery

Clement Jackson was at home by the South African coast, tending to the meat on his beloved braai, when the call about the body came. He found contentment at the barbecue. Bald, with craggy features and prominent ears, he liked to impart the secrets of a succulent lamb shank or the perfect T-bone to his children. They were grown up, with children of their own, but even as he approached 60, Jackson was not ready to yield the tongs to them just yet.

Since heart trouble brought an early end to his police career 20 years earlier, Jackson had worked as a private detective. Born in 1959 – just as Nelson Mandela was going on trial for treason – he’d followed his father into the force. Jackson loved the sleuthing, assembling a jigsaw of evidence. Specialising in mining, he made his name in the late 1980s, when he cracked the smuggling rings that rich South Africans were using to squirrel bullion and precious stones abroad during the final years of apartheid.

The mining industry was an engine of the bribery, violence and inequality that continued to blight South Africa even after Mandela took power. So once Jackson began to take on private clients, there was plenty of detective work to do. In 2016, one of his industry contacts referred a new client to him. Jackson stepped away from the braai to take the call.

The American voice on the phone belonged to a mining investor. He wanted Jackson to investigate the mysterious death of a geologist who had worked on his South African ventures. The geologist’s name was André Bekker. The previous night, 28 October 2016, Bekker’s white Audi Quattro had been set alight on a suburban street in Johannesburg, South Africa’s commercial capital. When the flames burned out, Bekker’s charred body lay slumped against the back door.

Jackson agreed to take the case. A few days later, he flew to Johannesburg. He began by considering whether Bekker’s death could have been suicide. The fire appeared to have started at the front of the car. Could Bekker have ignited the blaze from the back seat, perhaps with a bullet? Next to impossible, Jackson was told when he visited an Audi dealership. The car had burned so hot that it seemed someone must have doused it with an accelerant. Jackson, as I reported years later, grew convinced this was a murder.

Bekker, Jackson learned, had been going through a divorce and his family suspected he sometimes paid for sex. But he found nothing to suggest that those close to Bekker wanted him dead. Each new lead hit a wall. Then one day in December 2016, Jackson arranged to meet a sensitive source he’d known for years. The source produced a piece of paper and drew a diagram of a multinational mining corporation Jackson had never heard of: ENRC.

With mines from Kazakhstan to Congo, ENRC – Eurasian Natural Resources Corporation – was once one of the most valuable companies on the London Stock Exchange, worth £20bn at its peak just a few years earlier. In 2007, when it floated, captains of British business, two of them with knighthoods, were appointed to ENRC’s board to steward this new giant of UK commerce. Soon, though, the business pages were carrying tales of boardroom ructions. The oligarch founders, three billionaires from the former Soviet Union known as the Trio, were fighting the company’s directors for control of this vast mining empire. The scandal deepened when allegations emerged that the prized mines ENRC had taken over in Africa were won with bribes.

Jackson’s source told him about another of ENRC’s African deals. In 2011, it had bought a manganese prospect in South Africa called Kongoni. The price was $295m. Which was odd. Because Kongoni was so remote and hard to mine that it was worth nothing like as much. That, at least, had been the view of an expert geologist who had examined it: André Bekker.

“This thing,” Jackson said to himself as he heard the dead man’s name, “it’s much deeper than we thought.”

Jackson worked his mining contacts to find out everything he could about the Kongoni deal. He came to think it was a fraud. Less than two years after the deal, the value of Kongoni recorded in ENRC’s accounts was not $295m – but zero. The company blamed a fall in the manganese price, suggesting the asset’s value might go up again. But Bekker had told others in the industry that Kongoni had never been worth $295m. Not even half as much. The geology just wasn’t good enough.

And there was another mystery. Who had ENRC bought Kongoni from? Beyond the names of some obscure offshore companies, the accounts did not say who had received ENRC’s $295m. Though he didn’t have definitive proof, Jackson suspected this was a scheme to siphon that money out of a British PLC.

Back in his police days, Jackson could have ordered raids, compelled production of documents, extracted bank statements. Now it was just him. And after a few months, with Bekker’s death still unsolved, his client stopped paying. Other cases came and went, but Bekker’s ghost would not let Jackson rest. He felt an affinity with this fellow ageing Afrikaner, whose children reminded Jackson of his own. Even though there was no evidence tying the death to the deal, Bekker’s burned Audi had led Jackson to the mining deal. And if the truth of Bekker’s final hours eluded him, maybe he could solve the riddle of Kongoni.

Jackson learned that there was a law-enforcement agency, far away, that was investigating ENRC for suspected corruption and fraud. The UK’s Serious Fraud Office, Jackson believed, was free of the interference that bedevilled South African agencies. What’s more, the SFO was backed not by an impoverished young democracy, but by one of the world’s oldest and richest, which prided itself on leading the global fight against corruption. So he sent the SFO an email.

Just before Christmas 2018, investigators on the SFO’s ENRC team rang Jackson. The following April, they flew him to London. He spent two days with them at SFO headquarters, explaining what he had discovered about the Kongoni deal. Listening to their questions, Jackson could tell they had also been looking into it. They seemed highly professional. As he set off back to South Africa, he said to himself: “They are fucking going to crack this case.”

2: Nightmare on Elm Street

The stakes for the SFO could hardly have been higher. A series of courtroom defeats and calamitous errors had severely damaged its reputation. Politicians had even threatened to scrap the agency. The ENRC case was a chance to prove its worth against some of the richest and most powerful targets it had ever taken on. The SFO’s annual budget was around £60m; the Trio’s mining empire brought in that much every few days.

And something much bigger was on the line. While leaders like David Cameron hosted grand conferences on fighting corruption, London was increasingly seen as the global hub for dirty money. Since the 1990s, the UK had become home from home for those who made their fortunes from the implosion of the Soviet Union. The oligarchs bought mansions and football clubs, donated to political parties and universities, and took their place in the British establishment. Assisted by London lawyers and PRs, they crafted images as visionary tycoons. Yet as the truth about the crime and corruption behind many of these fortunes emerged, and as oligarchs’ ongoing entanglements with Vladimir Putin and other ex-Soviet dictators became clear, a disturbing question emerged. Were these billionaires truly subject to UK law? Or were they simply so wealthy, their influence so great, that they and their corporations enjoyed impunity, regardless of what they did to get rich and stay rich?

It was not new, this sense that the rich get away with it. In 1986 the Economist reported that recent scandals had “raised doubts abroad that the City of London is the most honest place to do business”. Lord Roskill, the senior judge Margaret Thatcher’s government appointed to examine the state of fraud in the UK, agreed. “While petty frauds, clumsily committed, are likely to be detected and punished, it is all too likely that the largest and most cleverly executed crimes escape unpunished,” his commission reported. Top of its recommendations was “a new unified organisation” to tackle these crimes. This body would, for the first time, bring prosecutors and specialist investigators under one roof. The government accepted Roskill’s proposal, and the Serious Fraud Office opened on 6 April 1988.

Before its first year was over, newspapers were reporting that the agency was “under growing pressure to show results”. In its first major case, the SFO charged the “Guinness Four” – among them pillars of British business – with manipulating the drinks company’s share price in aid of a takeover. All four men were convicted, including the former Guinness boss. But his five-year sentence was halved on appeal, two other Guinness prosecutions collapsed, and a further defendant was acquitted. The case revealed the paradox that has dogged the SFO ever since. The harder and more complex the investigations it takes on, the more it is fulfilling its mission – and the likelier it is to fail.

Not all the defeats have been of the SFO’s making. As globalisation accelerated after the end of the cold war, the SFO’s work grew more international. Operating from offices on Elm St in London’s legal district, it increasingly focused on bribery abroad by UK-registered companies and British citizens. Some of these cases have been sensitive, putting the agency under extraordinary pressure. During an investigation into whether bribes had been paid to clinch BAE Systems’ fighter-jet deal with Saudi Arabia, the Saudis threatened to cease counter-terrorism cooperation. In the wake of the 2005 London bombings, this was a potent threat. On the instructions of Tony Blair’s attorney general, in 2006 the SFO dropped the case. Judges later called the decision “abject surrender” to “blatant” Saudi threats. The UK’s claim to be fighting corruption was trashed.

Even without such political meddling, the SFO developed a knack for bungling legal procedure. Under Richard Alderman, who took over in 2008, the agency cemented its reputation as what Private Eye magazine calls the Serious Farce Office. In March 2011, having tipped off the press, Alderman’s SFO staged a dawn raid to arrest two London billionaires over allegations related to the collapse of a bank during the financial crisis. The warrants, a court later found, were secured using “inadequate and unfair” information. The SFO ended up paying the Tchenguiz brothers more than £7m in damages and costs. As Theresa May, then home secretary, drew up plans to disband the SFO, one senior officer said morale was at “rock bottom”. The press called it “Nightmare on Elm Street”.

But Alderman had also launched a case with the potential to restore the SFO’s standing. Not long after the botched Tchenguiz raids in 2011, he learned that a major UK corporation was quietly conducting an internal investigation into suspected fraud and corruption. One of Alderman’s lieutenants wrote to the company to suggest a meeting. The company was ENRC.

So began a saga that would consume the SFO for the next 12 years. Its team would come to investigate whether, just as Clement Jackson thought, hundreds of millions had been siphoned out of ENRC, much of it flowing to the Trio, according to court documents I’ve seen.

The evidence gathered by the SFO, like the evidence gathered for this article, leaves many vital questions unanswered. But the public interest in telling this story is clear. The struggle between the Trio and the SFO would go on to reshape the UK’s legal landscape, touching everything from confidentiality to surveillance, defamation to free speech, and the duties that lawyers owe their clients. And yet, in 2023, the agency would drop its ENRC investigation with no charges brought, owing to what it said was insufficient admissible evidence.

There is, though, a judgment on its way. Not of the oligarchs, but of the SFO itself. Having ruled that the agency mistreated the Trio’s corporate empire, a judge will now decide how much UK taxpayers’ money should be paid to the oligarchs’ company in damages. The SFO has set aside a quarter of a billion pounds.

Which leaves one question above all: how did one of the UK’s highest-profile financial crime investigations collapse into such utter humiliation?

3: More Soviet than City

ENRC’s listing on the London Stock Exchange in 2007 was celebrated as the City’s latest triumph in attracting the global 1%. Its founders, the Trio, came from the ex-Soviet republics of Central Asia. Two of them, Alexander Mashkevitch and Patokh Chodiev, got their start in Russia. As communism dissolved into capitalism, the pair worked at a Russian trading house that, Chodiev would later say, “stank of the KGB”. Alongside a trader named Alijan Ibragimov, they drummed up enough western finance to capture at bargain prices some of the valuable mines that the Kazakh dictator Nursultan Nazarbayev was privatising. Like Nazarbayev, the Trio grew stupendously wealthy.

In February 2008, as the financial crisis pitched millions into hardship, the Trio were honoured at Banqueting House on Whitehall. A Kazakh string quartet serenaded luminaries of British business in the halls where kings of England once feasted. The oligarchs’ coal and iron mines on the steppe were transforming, in name at least, into a UK public company. Its headquarters were at a smart address near Buckingham Palace.

Although the Trio had sold a fifth of ENRC’s shares to stock exchange investors, it soon became clear that they had no intention of relinquishing control over the company. When the Trio ejected ENRC’s independent directors from the board in 2011, one of those directors pronounced their tactics “more Soviet than City”. It seemed ENRC was both. It apparently remained the private empire of oligarchs accustomed to deploying immense sums of money however they pleased. At the same time, it was a FTSE-100 British business with a compliance department supposed to ensure the highest standards of corporate conduct.

ENRC had been a listed UK company for three years when, late in 2010, an anonymous whistleblower alleged fraud and bribery at its Kazakh mines. In most such cases, there’s a routine. The company hires a City law firm to investigate the allegations. If wrongdoing is found, the company informs the Serious Fraud Office, and asks for a deal. In exchange for coming clean, the company can usually avoid a corporate criminal charge and get away with a fine. With its chequered trial record, reaching settlements also suits the SFO: the company pays the dizzying legal fees for an investigation, the two sides agree a version of events and the size of a fine, and no one takes any chances in front of a jury.

The investigation at ENRC was expected to follow this playbook. It did not.

4: ‘Corrupt and criminal activities’

Neil Gerrard, the City lawyer who ENRC hired to investigate the whistleblower’s allegations, was a gruff former Metropolitan Police officer. As well as being a top fraud lawyer with years of investigative experience, he knew senior figures at the SFO. He seemed ideal for the job.

From the start, Gerrard could feel the tension between the two ENRCs – the first consisting of London business figures who considered themselves stewards of a listed company, and the second comprised of those loyal only to the Trio. When Gerrard and his team arrived in Kazakhstan, according to an account his firm later gave in the high court, they saw enough to suspect that fraud and bribery were indeed afoot within ENRC’s operations there, albeit apparently in quite minor ways. And he became aware of suspicious activity on what seemed a far larger scale elsewhere in the ENRC empire. Over summer 2011, Gerrard widened the investigation to Africa.

As ENRC’s lawyers dug into the company’s dealings in Africa, their inquiries quickly began to focus on the enigmatic figure who ran its operations there. Victor Hanna’s past was a closed book. Those who knew him gleaned that he had Egyptian heritage. The high school sports page of a 1988 Los Angeles Times records that he grew up in Australia, then California, redeploying his bulk from rugby to American football. A Victor Hanna of Los Angeles went on to serve eight years in the US army, gain a law degree, and work in finance, according to a 2007 press release by a US investment firm. Around that time, he became the Trio’s man in Africa.

Some of Hanna’s subordinates enjoyed his company. He was fond of boozy staff nights out. “I liked his forthrightness,” Ron Honey, a former ENRC employee in Africa, told me. “But he had too many hidden agendas.” He could be brash, former colleagues say, with a quick temper, disinclined to having his orders questioned. His picture was absent from company reports. Honey described witnessing Hanna snatch and smash a mobile phone after he was snapped on it.

Gerrard and his team established that, in the months before they started their investigation in December 2010, Hanna had overseen a series of deals for ENRC to buy mines, prospects and infrastructure in the Democratic Republic of the Congo and neighbouring countries also crippled by corruption. They set about gathering more information. Gerrard and his firm later alleged to the high court that Hanna was determined to thwart them. At one meeting, according to Gerrard, Hanna said he wanted advice on how to keep documents out of the SFO’s reach.

Within ENRC, Gerrard believed he discerned a struggle for control between those trying to run a PLC by the book and those loyal to the Trio, Hanna foremost among them. “Everyone was petrified” of Hanna, a director said to Gerrard, according to what he later told a court. When Gerrard learned of moves within ENRC to dramatically narrow his investigation, he delivered a warning. Gerrard emailed ENRC’s chairman in mid-2012 to say he had “grave concerns” that the SFO was losing confidence in the company’s willingness to cooperate: “The consequences of this will be the withdrawal of the civil process and the commencement of a criminal investigation.” Gerrard later told the high court he got his way: Hanna was pushed off the committee overseeing his investigation, and Gerrard delved deeper into the Africa deals.

As the investigation entered its third year, the SFO wrote to ENRC expressing impatience: “You will appreciate that if we cannot progress these matters with your assistance, we have no alternative but to progress them without your assistance.” Gerrard told the SFO to expect his findings on Africa by the end of March 2013.

Gerrard, his high court filing would later allege, was finding “further evidence that Mr Hanna, among others at ENRC, was involved in corrupt and criminal activities”. That included apparent violations of sanctions against Robert Mugabe’s regime in Zimbabwe. In Congo, Gerrard believed Hanna had covertly sent a $35m payment from ENRC to an Israeli businessman close to the country’s rulers. There were, Gerrard said, “reasonable grounds for concern that the true purpose” of the payment was to enable “corrupt payments to senior government officials” to advance ENRC’s business interests. (All of this has been very strongly denied by both Hanna and the mining company.)

A meeting was fixed for April, at which Gerrard was to present his findings to the SFO. In advance, Gerrard told ENRC’s directors that Hanna should be suspended, “as the evidence indicated that he had been directly involved in bribing public officials”. To achieve a civil settlement with the SFO, Gerrard said, ENRC would have to “sign up” to “wrongdoing on the part of individuals”. Hanna, it seemed, was to be handed over so that the corporation might be spared. One of Hanna’s old colleagues told me he felt a pang of sympathy. “He got an opportunity to be a big shot and he just got swept away. In his heart of hearts he’s not a bad guy. He was way, way out of his depth.”

On 25 March 2013, according to the account Gerrard later gave in court, ENRC’s chairman and the independent directors agreed that Hanna should be suspended. But although on paper the board was the corporation’s highest authority, in reality ENRC’s masters were who they always had been – the Trio. Two days later, one of the Trio – Alexander Mashkevitch – appeared at ENRC’s headquarters. Victor Hanna was going nowhere. Instead, Neil Gerrard was fired.

5: A money trail to Mayfair

Gerrard’s dismissal torpedoed ENRC’s talks with the SFO. It seemed clear that those who controlled the company were no longer interested in a settlement. If the SFO was going to bring home this landmark case, they would have to do it themselves. On 25 April 2013, the agency announced a criminal investigation into ENRC.

The SFO told Gerrard’s firm to hand over the files of his investigation, including 184 records of interviews his team had conducted with ENRC staff past and present. ENRC went to court to argue that the work Gerrard had done was protected by legal professional privilege, the right that prevents the state from demanding to know what passes between lawyer and client. The argument would take years to work its way through the courts, but ENRC clearly had a strong claim, and the SFO’s team sought new ways to build the case independently of Gerrard’s investigation.

Transnational corruption investigations are slow. They take, on average, seven years. But the SFO was making progress under new management. The bungling Alderman had departed at the end of 2012, replaced by a respected new boss, David Green. Even after the Trio bought back the shares they had sold on the London Stock Exchange, taken the company private and moved their corporate headquarters to Luxembourg, the SFO’s investigators persisted. In September 2016, they interviewed Victor Hanna. He had, by then, left ENRC. He had left his wife, too, marrying the daughter of one of the Trio, Patokh Chodiev. Another of the oligarchs, Mashkevitch, took his seat in the SFO’s interview room the following year. He, Hanna, and ENRC itself maintained their innocence. An SFO source was quoted in the Evening Standard saying ENRC was “our next big case and number one priority”. The only question seemed to be: who is going to be charged, and how soon?

The SFO’s central line of inquiry was the suspected bribery in Congo. This alleged corruption was the familiar kind: individuals purportedly paying bribes to advance the company’s interests. But some of the SFO’s sources claimed there was an additional kind of dirty business going on: individuals within ENRC siphoning money out of the company under the guise of legitimate business deals. In the former case, the company was the alleged beneficiary; in the latter, it was the alleged victim.

Some of the mining assets ENRC was buying in Africa and elsewhere belonged not to other companies but to ENRC’s main shareholders – the Trio. Some of the prices seemed very generous, much higher than what the oligarchs themselves had paid to acquire them. It seemed as though the deals might have been designed to move money out of a UK listed company and into the oligarchs’ own accounts, with a nice profit.

In 2018, a new source from South Africa got in touch regarding what he said was another questionable deal. He claimed to have significant information about ENRC’s acquisition of a manganese prospect named Kongoni. After an initial Skype call, Phil Hawkins, a plain-spoken former tax investigator who was one of the dozen SFO staff on the ENRC team, decided it was worth bringing the source to London for further discussions.

That was how, in April 2019, Clement Jackson found himself checking into a hotel close to the new SFO headquarters off Trafalgar Square. Jackson told me about his discussions with Hawkins and the team in the agency’s drab cubicles. “They wanted to prove ENRC’s purchase of Kongoni was overvalued,” he said. One potential witness who might have elucidated this, André Bekker, was no longer alive. But Jackson thought he had found “a big piece of the puzzle”.

As the private detective spoke, the SFO team took notes. By then, they were “really interested” in Kongoni, another person who assisted Hawkins and the team told me, saying they regarded the deal as “insane”. An assessment by the respected mining consultancy Royal Haskoning, apparently produced for ENRC following the deal, suggested that developing Kongoni could result in losses ranging from large to enormous. Yet one of the UK’s most valuable companies had handed over $295m for this scrubby patch of South African terrain. More perplexing still, the recipients of this huge amount were hidden.

A breakthrough came while Jackson was in London. The SFO raided the office of a solicitor five minutes away along the Thames. Not long after the Kongoni deal, in 2013 this solicitor had been involved in the £8m purchase of an Edwardian house on a Mayfair mews. The new occupants were ENRC’s head of Africa, Victor Hanna, and his wife, Mounissa Chodieva, daughter of one of the Trio.

In the raid, the SFO discovered Swiss bank accounts through which the money to buy the house appeared to have passed. It requested more information from the Swiss authorities. We know this because a Swiss court later ruled on the request. Like all Swiss rulings, this one does not name the protagonists. But they are identified by their description. One is described as being, at the time, the Africa boss of the corporation under investigation, who was also married to one of its founder’s daughters – plainly this is Hanna. According to the ruling, the SFO told the Swiss that it believed he had “obtained” most of the $295m ENRC paid out in the Kongoni deal by arranging for it to be paid to offshore companies he controlled. Then, the SFO alleged, he shared it out. Some went on the mews house. A “substantial portion” of the remaining money “was channelled … to the beneficiaries, including the founders”.

In other words, the SFO was saying there was reason to ask whether Hanna and the Trio had looted what was, at the time, one of the UK’s biggest corporations. If the investigators were on the right track, then it seemed they might have a chance, in Jackson’s words, of fucking cracking the case.

6: Lawyers on trial

For all the SFO investigators’ enthusiasm as they listened to what he had discovered about Kongoni, Jackson also detected a note of trepidation. We’re having some trouble with lawyers, Hawkins said.

Two years earlier, in 2017, ENRC had taken a highly unusual step. It filed a lawsuit against its own former lawyers. Neil Gerrard and his firm, Dechert, had betrayed their client, ENRC alleged. Gerrard had pushed ENRC to enter negotiations with the SFO, then expanded the scope of his investigation far beyond what was necessary, “in reckless disregard of his duties in order grossly to inflate the bills”. Put another way, Gerrard had seen ENRC, this chaotic corporation backed by oligarchs, as a mark. His former client claimed Gerrard told scare stories about SFO raids that would ensue unless the company gave him more and more work. In total, his firm had billed ENRC £13m.

The filing offered little hard evidence to support a claim that a senior City lawyer had gone rogue. “ENRC’s real complaint,” Gerrard and Dechert countered in a legal filing, “is that the defendants were too successful uncovering wrongdoing.” And the lawsuit swiftly seemed to backfire. Freed from the usual constraints of confidentiality by the need to answer the allegations, in June 2018 Gerrard and Dechert filed a blistering defence, the first substantial public account of his three-year investigation. ENRC’s own former lawyers claimed that “the majority of its African business appeared to represent the proceeds of criminal conduct”.

But the lawsuit also forced Gerrard and Dechert to disclose evidence to the new team of lawyers and private investigators that ENRC had hired. Those lawyers were encouraged by what they read in these new documents. So much so that in March 2019, shortly before Clement Jackson landed in London, ENRC had commenced a further legal action. The claim was a bombshell. ENRC was suing the Serious Fraud Office.

The Trio’s corporation claimed that the SFO had, through the “arbitrary, oppressive and/or unconstitutional” conduct of its leadership, committed what is called “misfeasance in public office”. Its senior officers had, the lawsuit alleged, conspired with ENRC’s lawyer, Neil Gerrard, to have him violate his professional duties by helping the SFO open a case that could lead to a high-profile win for the embattled agency, while Gerrard milked ENRC for fees. The SFO had faced civil actions before, typically to challenge some technical aspect of its handling of a case, but never an allegation so grave.

“This,” one City lawyer thought upon learning of ENRC’s move, “is bold.” A judge decided that ENRC’s suit against Gerrard and his firm, Dechert, should be combined with the one against the SFO into a single case. Preparations began for a blockbuster trial – not of the Trio, their allies or their corporation, but of their enemies in the UK legal system.

7: ‘Screw these fuckers’

The barrister representing Neil Gerrard and his firm could not have been more contemptuous. Giving his opening statement in May 2021, he derided ENRC’s accusations as “the stuff of conspiracy theories”.

In the witness box, John Gibson, who had led the SFO’s investigation into ENRC from 2014 to 2018, said he felt “compelled” to “question the true motives” for ENRC to sue the SFO. “The criminal investigation into ENRC, which involves suspicions of extremely serious multinational bribery and corruption, remains open,” Gibson said. The real reason ENRC had sued the SFO, “is to influence the decisions taken in the ongoing criminal investigation”.

If Gibson was right, it seemed that the Trio’s strategy was to use legal action to hound the UK state into abandoning potential criminal charges. To win, ENRC’s legal team would have to show that Gerrard, a high-flying City lawyer commanding millions in fees, was a liar who conspired against his own clients. It looked like a desperate long shot. Until the day when, in the witness box at the high court, Gerrard was revealed to be precisely that.

During Gerrard’s testimony about his time as ENRC’s lawyer, it emerged that his firm had failed to disclose copies of his old text messages. When these messages were revealed, ENRC’s trial team compared them against sworn evidence Gerrard had given. He had told the court he’d been unaware that ENRC’s compliance officer had secretly given an interview to the SFO. If he had known this, he would have been obliged to inform his client, since it was clearly of vital importance. Yet the new messages showed that Gerrard was not telling the truth. He had known about the secret SFO interview, but he had kept that information from his client, ENRC.

“You have lied to the court,” ENRC’s barrister said to Gerrard. The judge intervened to remind Gerrard of his “right not to answer a question which might expose you to a criminal charge”. After a break, Gerrard returned to the witness box. He told the court he’d been suffering from “global amnesia”, and might have forgotten the explosive texts. He produced no medical evidence to support this.

Others had clearer memories. Cameron Findlay was a freelance investigator who was helping Gerrard with his ENRC work. In his testimony, Findlay described Gerrard’s arrival at a meeting in Chelsea. It was August 2011, a few months after Gerrard had been hired by ENRC. Gerrard, Findlay said, turned up rubbing his hands together and announced: “Right boys, I’m in rape mode.” He was planning to “screw these fuckers” – ENRC, his clients – for millions.

On 16 May 2022, Mr Justice Waksman handed down his judgement. Gerrard, he found, was a liar. He had been negligent “and for the most part reckless” in expanding his ENRC investigation ever wider to generate more fees, including by slipping information to the SFO. Gerrard was “so obsessed with making money from his work that he lost any real sense of objectivity, proportion or indeed loyalty to his client”, Waksman found. (A spokesperson for Dechert told me that Gerrard’s conduct “does not reflect our firm’s values”. Gerrard “maintains that he did nothing wrong”, his lawyer said, and the case has “taken a serious toll” on Gerrard’s health.)

For the SFO, the trial was a blow to its already tattered reputation. Although the judge ruled that ENRC had not proved misfeasance in public office, he found that Alderman’s SFO had shown “bad faith opportunism” in repeatedly accepting information from Gerrard against his client’s interests. Even if SFO officers had simply been trying to gather useful information for its ENRC case, they should not, Waksman decided, have accepted it from a lawyer who was betraying his client. Alderman himself had acted in “gross and deliberate breach” of his duties, and former senior SFO officers had sought to deceive the court.

In suing the SFO, Gerrard and Dechert, ENRC had turned the tables on its adversaries. The trial did not examine whether the allegations of fraud and corruption by ENRC were true, but it blew a hole in the reliability of the messenger, Gerrard. And it switched attention from the substance of the investigation to the conduct of the investigators. On that, the judge’s verdict was clear. Yet this did nothing to resolve the questions about ENRC’s own conduct in Africa.

And so, even as the drama of the Gerrard scandal unfolded in the high court, the SFO team was doggedly continuing its work. By this point, the investigators had been building the criminal case against ENRC for seven years. They had been granted extra government funding available for “blockbuster” investigations that consume more than 10% of the SFO’s annual budget. And the case had just become still more significant.

On 24 February 2022, just before Waksman’s judgement, Vladimir Putin began his full-scale invasion of Ukraine. In response, then-home secretary, Priti Patel, announced a crackdown on dirty money in the UK. She denounced the “mob of oligarchs and kleptocrats who have abused the financial system and the rule of law for too long”. But the UK’s flagship investigation into alleged financial abuses stemming from the former Soviet Union was under sustained legal attack.

The SFO’s progress in its case against ENRC had been painfully slow. But the April 2019 raid on the London solicitor involved in buying Victor Hanna’s mews house had broken new ground. It unearthed what appeared to be a money trail that showed where some of the hundreds of millions ENRC paid out in the Kongoni deal had ended up. All that remained to make a money-laundering case, it seemed, was evidence that this money originated from a crime.

Then, three months into the Ukraine war, Phil Hawkins of the SFO’s ENRC team received another email from Clement Jackson.

“Good morning Phil,” Jackson wrote from South Africa. “Can I forward you some very interesting correspondence I received recently.” The correspondence, Jackson indicated, related to ENRC’s Kongoni deal. “It contains,” he wrote, “very damaging information.”

8: ‘We do not require any further information’

By 2022, it had been six years since Jackson had first come across André Bekker, ENRC and the Kongoni case. Since his visit to London to see the SFO, Jackson had suffered a heart attack. Following emergency surgery, he thought back over his life, the unceasing strain of his work, running agents inside smuggling rings, always up against some formidable adversary. “I went through a lot of fucking stress,” he told me. Now it was time to slow down, his doctors said. But he could not leave Kongoni unsolved. He believed he knew what had gone on. He just needed the proof.

As Mr Justice Waksman was preparing to give his judgement in ENRC’s suit against the SFO in early 2022, Jackson received, via a source, a copy of an email. It had been sent by Mike Nunn, head of the South African mining company that sold Kongoni back in 2011. In the email, Nunn told an investor the price: $145m. Jackson stared at the number. It was $150m less than what ENRC had paid for Kongoni. Where was the rest?

Here, at last, was evidence of fraud, Jackson believed. When he offered the SFO this “damaging information”, Hawkins replied later the same day. “Hi Clement. Good to hear from you – I trust you are well? If you have information you wish to provide, this can come direct to me, or via ‘contact us’ on our website.” Jackson went ahead and sent the document.

That was only one email. Not, on its own, compelling evidence of missing millions.

But a few months later, Jackson got in touch with Hawkins again, indicating he had another killer document. “If this is of assistance and need I can forward the information,” Jackson wrote.

This document appeared to be a near-final draft of the contract for the sale of Kongoni. It contained a sale price very close to the $145m mentioned in Mike Nunn’s email. And there was something else striking about it. The record of revisions to the document showed that, as the contract had originally been drafted, Kongoni was to be sold to ENRC directly. But it had been altered. Kongoni was instead to be sold to a newly created company registered in Mauritius, an island nation off the African coast known for corporate secrecy. There was no obvious reason for this change.

And there were further puzzling elements to the emails in which this draft contract and other paperwork was exchanged between the parties. In one, Nunn says people on the ENRC side “interposed” this preliminary sale to the mysterious Mauritian company. Indeed, two senior ENRC employees are on the email thread preparing the deal. Another email, sent by Nunn’s investor, recounted how he had bumped into Victor Hanna, then ENRC’s Africa boss, on a flight to London. Hanna “confirmed everything” about the transaction structure.

And yet it seems clear that this structure made ENRC the victim of a massive loss. Instead of taking ownership of Kongoni for $145m straight away, the asset went to mysterious offshore owners first, then to ENRC just three months later for twice as much.

Jackson had nothing to show who these hidden beneficiaries behind the Mauritian company were. But, unknown to him, the SFO was asking questions. By the time Jackson offered to share his new evidence, the agency was trying to trace where the Kongoni millions had gone. According to the Swiss court ruling, the SFO said it had “obtained bank statements” showing that “companies registered in Mauritius” had received hundreds of millions of dollars from ENRC purportedly for a South African manganese prospect. The bank statements, the SFO told the Swiss, “show that these companies then made tens of millions of USD in payments to various beneficiaries for purposes other than the explanation given” to ENRC. These beneficiaries, the SFO told the Swiss, may have included Hanna and the Trio.

If the SFO’s theory was right – and Jackson’s documents seemed to tally with it – then the Trio had been looting their own company. It would not be totally implausible in light of the history of the former Soviet Union. Oligarchs built their empires in places where business is often done at gunpoint, and the cost of losing a dictator’s favour is to have everything taken from you. One of the ways that emerged to guard against this was to float your company somewhere like London, from where assets are far harder for despots to expropriate. But with that came all the rules and laws and scrutiny of western markets. Suddenly, your fortune was no longer yours. Unless, that is, you could find ways to bleed it back out of the listed corporation into your own private accounts.

Whatever the motive might have been, Jackson thought that in this new document he had, at last, found a smoking gun – hard evidence indicating millions had gone missing from a multinational corporation. On 2 February 2023, he emailed Hawkins with the news, offering to “forward the information”.

“Dear Clement,” Hawkins replied the next day. “Good to hear from you. All is well at this end. Thank you for the email below, but I can confirm we do not require any further information on the transaction. Kind regards, Phil.”

Jackson was baffled. An established source was offering the UK’s fraud-fighting agency evidence of what seemed to be a vast fraud at one of the UK’s biggest companies – and the SFO didn’t want to know.

9: Once in a lifetime

A few months later, in July 2023, I flew to Johannesburg to see Clement Jackson. We met at a restaurant. He arrived wearing his usual baggy shirt and a woolly tank top against the crisp winter air. A waitress came over. “What would you recommend on the meat side?” Jackson asked. He ordered a steak. As far as I can tell, he subsists entirely on red meat, plus the occasional potato. When I offered him a piece of my broccoli, he winced.

As we ate, Jackson reflected on the Kongoni affair. “This is a once in a lifetime case,” he said. He couldn’t understand Hawkins’ reply to his recent email offering dynamite evidence. There was no way for the SFO’s investigators to know if the document Jackson was offering was one they already had – he had described it only in the broadest terms. And even if it were, a key part of bringing the case to a prosecution would be gathering a body of evidence that was not infected by the agency’s ruinous dealings with Neil Gerrard. Jackson’s material was fruit of the unpoisoned tree. Why didn’t the SFO want it?

I was back in London the next month when a possible explanation emerged. On 24 August 2023, 10 years after it opened the criminal investigation, the SFO announced that it had closed the ENRC case. It blamed “insufficient admissible evidence to prosecute” in the case of alleged bribery in Congo. There was no mention of the investigation into the possible laundering of the proceeds from the alleged Kongoni fraud. I asked the SFO if it had abandoned that investigation too. It declined to answer. Only a month earlier, it had triumphed in its four-year attempt to gain access to more records from the Swiss bank accounts it suspected had been used to channel the Kongoni proceeds. Swiss judges cleared the way for authorities to give the agency what its investigators wanted. But, according to a Swiss press account that the SFO has not disputed, rather than examine this fresh evidence, it withdrew the request.

The SFO would not discuss the case with me. So I asked Ian Winter KC, a barrister who has successfully defended clients charged by the SFO, what he made of the ENRC case. “It ought to have been a pretty routine prosecution,” Winter claimed. “There was some pretty strong evidence of what was going on. And a clear public interest in prosecuting.” But Winter said he believed that no criminal judge would permit a prosecution whose origins the high court had found to be so tainted. Mr Justice Waksman had ruled that the SFO “would not have commenced the criminal investigation” had its then boss Richard Alderman not connived with ENRC’s lawyer Neil Gerrard. This happens from time to time in the criminal justice system: regardless of how compelling the evidence, if, say, an investigating police officer coerced a witness or botched a warrant, the accused walks free. Other City lawyers I spoke to believed, like Winter, that ENRC’s legal onslaught against the SFO had helped to scupper the criminal investigation.

And the SFO has not been the only target. ENRC’s legal fightback has become a multi-front war stretching from New York to Harare to Astana, in more than a dozen proceedings. Among its targets in the UK have been one of its former directors, a security contractor, an IT specialist, an information trader and a dissident ex-prime minister of Kazakhstan. Related proceedings in the US have targeted a journalist, two private intelligence consultants, a firm of auditors, and even (unsuccessfully) the former UK deputy prime minister Nick Clegg, in connection to his wife’s work as a lawyer on ENRC business. At the heart of most of these claims has been information that became public but which ENRC says it was entitled to keep secret.

ENRC cases have reached some of the highest courts in the land. In one important ruling, the court of appeal blocked the SFO from gaining access to the work Neil Gerrard had done investigating ENRC, strengthening the legal privilege that shields a corporation’s inquiries into suspected crime from scrutiny by the authorities. And there was a high-profile defamation claim in the high court. That one helped to trigger a campaign to stop such actions being used to muzzle the press. I know the case well. It was brought against me.

10: ‘It is our client’s view that Mr Burgis is biased’

The Trio and their corporation feature extensively in Kleptopia, my book about how dirty money is conquering the world. After it came out in 2020, I arranged to meet the lawyer John Gibson. From 2014 to 2018, he had worked at the SFO, where he ran the ENRC investigation. I knew ENRC had used private spies such as the notorious firm Black Cube, which targeted Harvey Weinstein’s victims. So I always took precautions meeting anyone in the company’s orbit, using encrypted messaging apps and picking discreet locations. Nonetheless, a few weeks later, Gibson received a threatening letter from ENRC’s lawyer at Quinn Emanuel, one of several top firms it retains. The letter accused him of leaking confidential information. “You met with Mr Burgis at an underground car park near the National Theatre, London, in a clandestine manner,” it said. Gibson, ENRC’s lawyer added, was carrying “an orange/red notebook”. Evidently, someone had been watching.

ENRC is suing Gibson for allegedly leaking information from the SFO investigation he used to run. The trial is in October. “I wholly reject any suggestion that I have acted in any way dishonestly or improperly,” he said when testifying in the Gerrard case.

The Trio’s corporation sued me, too. Its court filings suggested I had been paid off to attack the company. ENRC’s defamation action claimed I had written that it had murdered potential witnesses in the SFO case, including André Bekker. It took until just after lunch at the first hearing in March 2022 for the judge to throw the case out. (We still don’t know the truth of these deaths, and in any case, humans, not companies, commit murder.) ENRC’s lawsuit was an example of “legal harassment used by those with deep pockets to silence journalists and other public watchdogs”, Index on Censorship and other press freedom campaigners said.

After the SFO dropped its investigation in August 2023, I wrote to ENRC, the oligarchs and Victor Hanna. The SFO had walked away, but there were unanswered questions about the Kongoni deal. Clement Jackson’s documents, plus the emails showing how the deal was done, suggested that a huge amount of money had gone missing from a major UK company.

ENRC’s lawyers at Taylor Wessing replied – not to me, but to the Guardian’s legal department – questioning my credibility. “It is our client’s view,” they wrote, “that Mr Burgis cannot be looking at these matters objectively given the previous litigation history between himself and ENRC and is biased.” The letter largely ignored my questions about Kongoni. “Any allegation that ENRC committed fraud is false,” the lawyers wrote.

I kept digging, and found the Swiss ruling on the SFO’s request for assistance with its Kongoni investigation. After figuring out what this thinly anonymised judgment was saying – that the SFO was looking at whether Hanna had extracted hundreds of millions of dollars from ENRC, sent some of it to the Trio and kept enough to buy himself a house in Mayfair – I wrote to ENRC again this May. Its lawyers replied, setting out the company’s position. ENRC had never been aware of Bekker’s doubts about Kongoni, they said. Nor had it ever seen the Royal Haskoning report that suggested the prospect could only be mined at a loss. ENRC had recorded Kongoni as worthless in one set of accounts not because it truly was, but because at the time the manganese price had fallen and the SFO investigation was making it hard to raise funding, the lawyers went on. Kongoni’s real value, far from being “negligible”, had been placed at $300m by “Chinese investors who expressed an interest in acquiring it” shortly before ENRC did. An “international bank” and several law firms advised on the deal, which was ultimately approved by the board. And ENRC’s lawyers told me that, while Kongoni was the main asset ENRC acquired in the deal, there were others too.

Emails went to and fro. Eventually, I boiled it down to some simple questions. In particular, when ENRC bought Kongoni, who was the money paid to? At this point, lawyers at Taylor Wessing accused me of “pursuing a premeditated agenda” and told the Guardian’s legal department that “our client does not see the point in engaging directly with Mr Burgis any further”.

I’d asked Taylor Wessing if the Trio themselves – now a duo, since the death of Ibragimov from Covid in 2021 – wished to respond to the allegations. The lawyers said they would not pass the questions to the oligarchs. When I pointed out that it was ludicrous to refuse to give their client ENRC’s owners the chance to comment, Taylor Wessing did not reply.

I also asked Hanna about the allegations in this article. Hanna denied wrongdoing, but did not provide any answers to my questions about what happened to the Kongoni millions. His lawyer said the allegations had been “thoroughly investigated by the SFO and no criminal charges have been brought against Mr Hanna, ENRC, or others in connection with it”. ENRC says the same thing. Its lawyers argue that there was one reason that the SFO dropped its investigation: it had been unable to find any evidence that ENRC had done anything wrong, because it never had.

Fifteen years since I began looking into ENRC, after reporting trips to four continents and resisting repeated efforts to expose my sources, following almost a year of exchanges between the Guardian’s lawyers and ENRC’s, and fresh threats of legal action if we printed this article, we decided that this story was in the public interest, and should be published.

11: All the law you can afford

The SFO may be finished with ENRC, but the oligarchs are not finished with the SFO. At a further trial, likely to take place next year, Mr Justice Waksman will decide how much UK public money the SFO must pay ENRC in damages.

According to ENRC’s most recent published accounts, two of the “major lenders” to its Luxembourg parent company are Sberbank and VTB. Both are Russian state-owned banks. They were placed under UK sanctions after Putin’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022. ENRC does not have direct debts to these banks, but the group to which it belongs “envisages payments to Sberbank and VTB in 2024”, the accounts say, stressing that they will be made “in compliance with all applicable laws and regulations”. So while the UK gives billions in military aid to Ukraine, it may also end up, via damages and debt repayments, in effect making a substantial payment to the other side.

It is hard to avoid the conclusion that the ENRC saga has been settled by force of money. Plenty of people have made lots of it: lawyers on all sides, City bankers, PRs, private spies and peers, not to mention the oligarchs, who retain their global mining empire. During the SFO investigation, ENRC’s accounts show that the Trio’s corporation spent nearly half a billion dollars on “professional fees and other exceptional litigation costs” as it brought legal actions against those who crossed it.

The losers, by contrast, are those who can least afford it. If money was stolen from a FTSE-100 company, the investors who are poorer as a result probably include many pensioners. If bribes were paid to those who run Congo, that helped entrench the kleptocracy that condemns generations of Congolese to privation and predatory rule. If Hanna and the Trio embezzled some of the $295m ENRC paid for Kongoni, that would suggest a big tax bill has gone unpaid in South Africa, where public services have all but collapsed. Meanwhile, in the UK, taxpayers are on the hook for the misconduct of SFO bosses.

Clement Jackson told me he was “stunned” when the SFO dropped the case. When I saw him in Johannesburg, he showed no sign of wavering in his pursuit of the truth. He is in touch with the Hawks – the South African FBI – who have told him they are looking into the Kongoni affair. “Life goes so fucking fast man,” he mused as he ate his steak. He told me he thinks often of André Bekker and his fatherless children. “I adore my grandkids. I adore my kids. When I’m not here, that’s what I want them to think. That I was involved. In making justice prevail.”