At the Royal Courts of Justice in London Lord Justice Leveson, the President of the Queen's Bench Division, has stamped his seal on the United Kingdom's first ever deferred prosecution agreement.

The subject matter of the indictment was section 7 Bribery Act 2010, the corporate offence. This is the first instance in which that section has featured in a prosecution.

Standard Bank Plc, now called ICBC Standard Bank (it was in February that the Industrial and Commercial Bank of China bought a controlling stake in Standard Bank's London-based global markets business) has paid a financial penalty and compensation, and had to pay the authorities the bulk of profits derived from its misconduct. It failed to prevent bribery on the part of an associated person and it also had to pay the costs of the Serious Fraud Office, which was involved in the case. All in all, it had to pay US$33 million.

The Anglo-African bank failed to prevent alleged bribery by its associates in Tanzania. Those people made payments to a so-called 'third party' and, according to Lord Justice Leveson, the 'only inference' can be that their intention was for the payment to induce government officials to show favour to the commercial proposal that the group was making, which was to take a mandate to raise funds on behalf of the government by way of a US$600 million sovereign note private placement. The Serious Fraud Office said that the bank 'self-reported.'

Leveson identified four factors he took into account when deciding whether a DPA would be the right course of action: the seriousness of the conduct; the way in which the organisation behaved once it became aware of it; any history of previous similar conduct; and, in this case, the extent to which the current corporate entity has changed from the one at the relevant time. Commentators are expecting judges in future judgments to pay special heed to these four tests.

The exalted judge noted that a DPA would have been less appropriate "in the interests of justice" if the charge had been the primary one of bribing another person, as laid out in s1. This says that a person (including, perhaps, a corporate person such as a bank) is guilty of an offence if he (or it) induces someone to perform a relevant function (any function of a public nature, connected with a business, trade or profession, performed in the course of one's employment, or performed by or on behalf of anyone) improperly or to reward him for doing so.

We must note here that, as per s3(6), a function or activity is a relevant function or activity even if it has no connection with the UK and is performed outside the UK.