[4] In 2016, the Serious Fraud Office (United Kingdom) (SFO) alleged before the High Court of Justice in a separate case brought by Unaoil that the firm was engaged in "extensive" corruption.
[6] In March 2016, the SFO began investigating allegations Unaoil acting corruptly in facilitating business deals involving Rolls-Royce, Halliburton-KBR, Petrofac, ABB, Leighton Holdings and Amec Foster Wheeler.
[7] In the United States, KBR, FMC Technologies and Core Laboratories all disclosed in 2016 that they had been contacted by the Department of Justice (DOJ) in connection with a probe of Unaoil.
[9] A leaked cache of Unaoil internal company emails dating from 2001 to 2012 were the subject of a series of articles published by Fairfax Media investigative reporters Nick McKenzie, Richard Baker and Michael Bachelard in the Australian newspaper The Age, and The Huffington Post in March 2016.
The statement said, "These searches and interviews were carried out in the presence of British officials as part of a vast, international corruption scandal implicating numerous foreign oil industry firms.
[15] In January 2017, the DOJ announced in a statement that Rolls-Royce had agreed to pay a $170 million fine to settle corruption allegations involving its use of several facilitators to win contracts, including Unaoil.
[21] In December 2021 the UK Court of Appeal overturned the bribery conviction of a Ziad Akle after finding that the U.K.'s Serious Fraud Office committed a "serious failure"[22] in refusing to turn over evidence[23] that would have helped him at trial.
[24] In December 2021, the Court of Appeal quashed the conviction of Unaoil’s former territory manager for Iraq Ziad Akle after the SFO disclosed evidence of ‘wholly inappropriate’ contacts with David Tinsley, a former US Drug Enforcement Administration agent who acted on behalf of the Ahsanis.
The review was criticizing the conduct of SFO's head in leading the Unaoil Investigation: "It is clear that [Lisa] Osofsky was faced with a difficult situation very early in her tenure and made a number of mistakes and misjudgements which, with the benefit of hindsight, she now accepts.
Labour Shadow Attorney General Emily Thornberry MP stated that the report "lays bare a catalogue of woeful mismanagement and inexplicable misjudgements at the top of the SFO".