SFO: "Truly out of the norm" Not a good day for financial cops. Hot on the heels of the FSA losing what it probably thought was a slam-dunk insider dealing case, the SFO has now received a withering "Judgement on Costs" over its toe-curling execution of the Tchenguiz case. The brothers get substantially all their legal bills paid. Here's the judgement. Click to read. A quick taste: Our starting point is that that the conduct of the former Director has to be considered against the background of the duty that there was imposed on him. That duty was the heavy and critically important duty of ensuring that the Information presented before Judge Worsley QC in support of the application for the warrants contained accurate and comprehensive material which itself was the product of a very careful and wellbalanced investigation. All these matters must have been apparent to the former Director. In this case, for the reasons explained in our judgment, the former Director wholly failed to discharge this duty in circumstances in which the claimants" reputations were bound to be seriously damaged by the issue and the execution of the warrants, given the very public manner in which this was done. As we set out in paragraph 85 of the judgment, the former Director, in answer to criticism, relied on the fact that the judge would have granted the warrants only if absolutely satisfied that it was the right thing to do. That made even clearer the importance of the duty. These serious errors were not accepted and the proceedings contested. By the time of the hearing the former Director had left office, but by then the die had been cast. Although a number of concessions were then made and the conduct of the hearing was, on the part of the Director and those representing him, exemplary in its analytical approach, the position in which RT had been placed by the errors made was such that the subsequent conduct was insufficient to mitigate what had happened before. Even after taking account of the points made by the Director, we have concluded for the reasons set out in the judgment that this was an exceptional case and that the conduct of the former Director in Lord Woolf's words in Excelsior takes this case "truly out of the norm." This was essentially the result of the unacceptable approach of the former Director to his vitally important duties of disclosure on the applications for search warrants in this case and then to his subsequent failure to appreciate these very significant failures until a very late stage of the proceedings. The former director here is Richard Alderman. He couldn't be reached for comment. In any case, this litigation is just a warm up act for the damages claims being prepared by Vincent and Robbie. They will argue that being arrested at dawn, in full media HD, by 135 members of City of London and Essex police proved to be bad for the brothers" business. Could it be that the Tchenguiz experience marks the end of these dawn raid antics, where in any financial case absurd numbers of cops are largely deployed for the benefit of Daily Mail photographers? Let's hope so. Related links: SFO ordered to pay Tchenguiz legal costs - FT.com Excelsior Commercial & Industrial Holdings Ltd v Salisbury Hammer Aspden & Johnson - heard by Lord Woolf in 2002