The Conservative Government of the United Kingdom has pledged to respond to white collar crime by incorporating the under-achieving Serious Fraud Office into the National Crime Agency with the aim of improving the way in which its employees share intelligence and investigate serious fraud, money laundering and other financial crime.

The SFO's remit takes in cases that involve £1 million or more. With three weeks to go before the UK's general election and a thumping victory within the governing party's grasp, the merger appears to be inevitable.

The last time that HM Government wanted to do something about the SFO's bad image, just after the damaging Al Yamamah corruption scandal in which the office abruptly ceased to investigate the skulduggery behind premier Tony Blair's £50 billion arms deal with Saudi Arabia, it awarded it the custodianship of the Bribery Act 2010. Nevertheless, the office maintained its soubriquet of "Nightmare on Elm Street," which referred to the address from which it eventually moved in December 2012.

In 2008 a court heard how BAe, the arms giant, obtained the help of Blair and Saudi Prince Bandar bin Sultan (known in the presidential American Bush family as 'Bandar Bush') to stop the SFO investigation. This prevented the SFO from obtaining court records from Switzerland that could have led to a bribery prosecution. Bandar has not denied receiving secret payments for his own purposes from BAe. Blair, according to court documents, wrote a "secret and personal" letter on 8th December 2006 to Attorney-General Goldsmith, demanding in extremely strong terms that he should stop the investigation. This, to the SFO's everlasting discredit, came to pass.

The SFO, then, might be hoping to leave behind the grubby image of a blundering colluder in governmental corruption for the more shadowy image that the NCA has cultivated.

The Conservative Thatcher Government gave the SFO some alarming powers under s2 Criminal Justice Act 1987 to force people to talk to it on pain of six months' imprisonment. At the time, it promised the public that it would never give such a power to any other agency. Since then, of course, the UK's financial regulators have acquired a similar power under s171 Financial Services and Markets Act 2000. The SFO will, no doubt, take its powers with it to its new place of business.

Lisa Osofsky, the head of European, Middle Eastern and African investigations at Exiger, the financial crime, risk and compliance advisory firm, told Compliance Matters: "One of the great mantras of the Conservative party in order to continue in government is security, so it makes sense to increase the scale of the NCA provided it maintains the bedrock of specialist criminal litigation experience and forensic analytical skills that the SFO has re-established under the direction of David Green QC.

"The Criminal Finances Act is fresh onto the statute books - one of Theresa May’s great initiatives from when she was Home Secretary – and comes into force this September, with clear new rules and powers to help crack down on terrorism financing so the political impetus is heightened to give teeth to those new powers. While new laws have been added, extending the criminal offences of “failure to prevent” into tax evasion and other forms of financial crime, this is part of a more joined-up, concerted plan to ensure that the UK balances its wish to maintain an attractive global economy for inward investment and financial services with [its desire not to attract] the sort of dirty money that can be used to finance the levels of international terror that might undermine the country’s security and derail its long-term vision for a prosperous, independent UK working in partnership with the EU member states.”