Hello there. Welcome back to a special series of Emlex podcasts designed to make sense of

2023 and what regulatory challenges the new year is likely to bring.

My name is James Panicki.

I'm Emlex's Asia Pacific Senior Editor, and I'm delighted to have your company again today.

Now, throughout 2022, members of our anti-bribery and corruption team have been popping up on our weekly podcast with some enthralling stories of bribery, money laundering

and all shapes and sizes of financial crime, or at times even a mixture of all of those elements.

There have also been several examples of legislative shake-ups in those policy areas.

But what does the new year hold? With this preview, here's our London-based senior

correspondent, Martin Coyle. Hi James, thanks for that. So looking ahead to 2023 from a UK

perspective, this year will see the departure of serious fraud office head Lisa Assovsky

and hopefully the announcement of a new permanent

head of the UK's fraud agency. Osovsky's five-year tenure is up in August, and it's fair to say

there's been some highs and lows from when she took up the reins in 2017. Earlier in her

tenure, Osovsky helped Sheppard through the deferred prosecution agreement against Airbus,

which saw the plane maker hand over 991 million euros over wide-ranging corruption.

And just last November, Commodity Giant Clencourt paid $276 million after pleading guilty to a corruption in a London court.

So those were the highs.

On the other hand, we saw the collapse of a criminal trial of two executives linked to Circo over disclosure failures by the SFO

and the freeing of a trio of men linked to UNit Oil who saw their convictions quashed following SFO failures.

Now attention will turn on to who will get that top job and indeed who will take the job and what direction they will take the agency going forward. The recruitment process is expected to begin shortly and head hunters will start looking out for candidates and we will be reporting on that process as the year goes on.

The SFO will also this month see the start of a criminal trial of two men, accused of corruption, linked to a former Airbus unit known as GPT Special Project Management.

Last year, a trial involving the men was halted after 10 weeks when the judge said it could no longer continue.

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