The case to answer for the Serious Fraud Office Against this background, the support, when it came, was even more startling. After criticising the SFO for failing "to see the wood for the trees," Sir John Thomas made this observation: "It goes to the necessity some may think of the proper financing of the Serious Fraud Office so that it can do things with the clarity with which they should be done." For David Green, the barrister who has just taken over at the head of the Serious Fraud Office, the focus on funding rather than foul-ups must have been a relief. For more than 12 months the UK's leading financial crime-fighting agency has suffered a steady depletion of staff, swingeing budget cuts and the ignominy of seeing its flagship investigation into Robert and Vincent Tchenguiz's involvement with failed Icelandic bank Kaupthing approach total collapse. On top of this the agency had recently fought off a concerted effort by the Home Office to subsume the SFO into the National Crime Agency. After the week in the courts it has just had, it is not just the reputation of the SFO that is on the line but its whole future. If the SFO is to survive as a stand-alone agency it will need to show it is fit for purpose, that it can investigate and prosecute serious financial crime and that the work could not be done better by another organisation. "David Green has a job to do in ensuring that the organisation is refocusing on what it is all about," explained Robert Wardle, former director of the SFO. There will always be a challenge to the agency from other organisations. But if the SFO doesn't exist to do these cases no one will do them. The police say they will but they never do. The point Wardle makes goes back to the Roskill report and the roots of the SFO in 1988. At the time it was decided the only way to investigate complex financial crime was to ring-fence a pot of money and ensure it was used for one purpose only - investigating financial crime. The work was considered so complex, time-consuming and expensive it would almost certainly be side-lined by an agency that had easier and more productive cases to pursue. Why dedicate thousands of man-hours and millions of pounds to a highly complex investigation when the same money could be spent prosecuting a far higher number of much simpler cases? Barrie Vitou, a financial crime specialist at lawyers, Pinsent Masons, said: "The reasons the SFO was created are as relevant today as they always were. Serious fraud requires a different approach and skills set to investigate and prosecute. That said, on its own admission the SFO has made some serious mistakes and the future of the SFO has been called into question. The mistakes the SFO seems to have made are in trying to short-circuit the complex nature of its work. The Tchenguiz investigation is a prime example. The SFO presented incorrect information to a criminal judge to get its search warrants, it was exposed trying to negotiate a £50m donation to charity from Robert Tchenguiz in return for dropping the case and it even went as far as to consider putting an undercover agent into Mayfair nightclub Annabel's to see if they could glean more information from the Tchenguiz brothers' favourite haunt. As one senior SFO insider who was not involved in the investigation asked: "What the ---- was going on?" The answer seems to be justice, US style. Without having the correct tools, such as the ability to negotiate plea bargains, the SFO has been trying to cut deals to speed up the legal process. The tactic worked in some cases - BAE, Innospec and Balfour Beatty all agreed to pay fines rather than face criminal prosecutions. In others, such as the Tchenguiz case, it has failed miserably. The feeling is that under the previous director, Richard Alderman, lawyers were replaced by administrators at the SFO. That, combined with a squeeze on funding led to mistakes being made, a loss of confidence from the judiciary and the agency losing support from government. Stephen Parkinson, partner at white-collar crime specialist Kingsley Napley, said: "For the SFO to have a proper future there is going to need to be a lot of investment from the Government. I am not sure there is the appetite. Does the Government think it is worth the candle? I am not sure. On top of this there is the problem of a looming £100m lawsuit from Vincent Tchenguiz against the SFO in relation to his arrest. The claim is three times the size of the SFO's annual budget. If any kind of settlement of this magnitude were reached it would require extraordinary funding from the Treasury, a black mark that would be hard to erase. However highly regarded the new director Green is, he faces a tough few months. The Crown Prosecution Service Inspectorate is carrying out a review of the SFO; he has the looming judgment from the High Court on the legality of the Tchenguiz search warrants and he needs to decide within the next three weeks whether to drop the investigation into Vincent Tchenguiz. None of this bodes well for the agency. True, Green has the newly enacted Bribery Act in his arsenal and could soon have the ability to negotiate plea bargains through deferred prosecution agreements. The question now is whether he will get the time and the money to use them. Most people in the legal profession hope he will, including, it seems, Sir John. At last week's judicial review into the arrests of the Tchenguiz brothers, he was asked what the Treasury should think about giving the SFO more funding. He replied: "I'm sure they would realise that that is also essential from their perspective regarding the City of London."