Latest news with #SallyClark
Scotsman
13 hours ago
- Business
- Scotsman
Prevention is better than cure when it comes to dealing with corruption
Put measures in place to lessen the risk of financial crimes occurring, says Sally Clark Sign up to our Scotsman Money newsletter, covering all you need to know to help manage your money. Sign up Thank you for signing up! Did you know with a Digital Subscription to The Scotsman, you can get unlimited access to the website including our premium content, as well as benefiting from fewer ads, loyalty rewards and much more. Learn More Sorry, there seem to be some issues. Please try again later. Submitting... Prison sentences were handed out in Glasgow last week to four men involved in a £6 million corruption and bribery investigation involving health boards across Scotland. This case, which underlines the importance of compliance and ensuring anti-financial crime prevention mechanisms are implemented and regularly monitored, exposed a series of fraudulently-awarded NHS contracts. Advertisement Hide Ad Advertisement Hide Ad Oricom Ltd, a company founded by Adam Sharoudi and Gavin Brown, secured deals to provide telecoms and video conferencing equipment to NHS trusts in Lothian, Grampian, Lanarkshire, Greater Glasgow & Clyde, and Ayrshire & Arran between 2010 and 2017. However, amid concerns about how the contracts were awarded, Oricom's offices were later raided by investigators including those from NHS Scotland Counter Fraud Services. CMS logo new The follow-up investigation found the company had been given 'commercially sensitive information' by former NHS employees Alan Hush and Gavin Cox. They received nearly £90,000 in cash and a range of other gifts, including luxury hotel stays, concert tickets, and holiday vouchers in return. The High Court heard how Hush helped Oricom land a number of business deals with the NHS including a £750,000 contract with NHS Lothian. Meanwhile, Cox helped the company secure contracts with NHS Lanarkshire. Overall, Hush was given £18,231 worth of cash bribes and gifts, while Cox received more than £70,000 of illicit rewards from the company. Advertisement Hide Ad Advertisement Hide Ad After being found guilty of a string of charges including bribery, corruption, fraud, and money laundering, Oricom founders Sharoudi and Brown were sentenced to eight and seven years' imprisonment respectively. Sally Clark is an Of Counsel and disputes resolution specialist, CMS Hush, who was telecommunications manager at NHS Lothian, then NHS Scotland video conferencing manager, was ordered to serve eight years while Cox, former head of IT and infrastructure at NHS Lanarkshire. received a six-year sentence. This case highlighted how basic procurement procedures were circumvented to ensure a company paying bribes was awarded contracts. This may be a familiar bribery tale, but is a strong reminder that putting in place avoidance measures to prevent corruption and other forms of financial crime is preferable to taking steps to deal with such violations. In this case, the police and NHS counter-fraud investigation began in 2015, and a decade-long journey culminated with a trial which heard 65 days of evidence. Advertisement Hide Ad Advertisement Hide Ad No business or organisation wants to face the potential legal costs, reputational damage, and prospect of immense disruption that accompanies a financial crime investigation. Those being investigated are typically required to provide materials under warrant, which includes the interrogation of computer systems by law enforcement agencies. Staff may also be required to provide witness statements and respond to ongoing queries from investigating authorities, all of which requires significant time and resource. Being involved in a law enforcement investigation can generate exceptional anxiety amongst staff members who are required to provide witness statements and give evidence in court. This also brings further business disruption with people being diverted from their core focus within a business or organisation. As this NHS case highlights, putting regularly monitored measures in place to prevent the prospect of financial crimes occurring is a much more preferable alternative to dealing with the fallout of failing to do so. The introduction of section 196 of the Economic Crime and Corporate Transparency Act 2023 should further underline this message – under this new provision, a business or organisation can be prosecuted for economic crimes that are perpetrated by senior managers who are on their staff.
Yahoo
06-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Yahoo
Sue Stapely, PR doyenne of the Law Society who worked on Doctor Who and campaigned to free Sally Clark
Sue Stapely, who has died aged 79, began her career with the BBC, working on shows including Doctor Who and Z Cars; she retrained as a solicitor and in 1989 she joined the Law Society, the professional body for solicitors, to head its media relations operation, helping to turn the society into an effective lobbying organisation. Along the way, as a member of the SDP, she stood as a candidate for the party in the 1987 general election and was the first national chair of the 300 Group, which aimed to encourage more women into politics. Later on she worked pro bono on behalf of the campaign to free Sally Clark, the 37-year-old solicitor convicted in 1999 of the murder of her two infant sons. The convictions were eventually overturned in 2003, though Sally Clark never recovered from the experience and was found dead at her home in 2007. Susan Sly was born on July 11 1946 to Stanley Sly and Kathleen, née MacIvor, and joined the BBC in 1966. During her time with Doctor Who she was an uncredited director's assistant on The Invasion (1968), in which the second Doctor, Patrick Troughton, takes on an army of Cybermen. She was involved in the scene in which the cyborgs march down the steps outside St Paul's Cathedral, even talking her then partner into one of the costumes. In 1972 she worked, again uncredited, on the series The Curse of Peladon, with the third Doctor, Jon Pertwee. 'I recall vividly Alpha Centauri and a range of rather louche monsters and some fairly dodgy special effects, as well as rather too much time spent in the cold water tank in Ealing Studios filming fight sequences,' she told the Law Society Gazette. Sally and Stephen Clark, 1999: Sue Stapely offered her help pro bono in co-ordinating media interest in the case of Sally Clark - David Burges In 1968 she married Simon Stapely and after leaving the BBC to start a family in 1973 she studied law at Kingston University, and at the College of Law, where she qualified as a solicitor while her two sons were still young. After working for several years as a manager at various Citizens Advice bureaus, she joined the solicitors Heald Nickinson, where she became a partner, heading its family law department and setting up its public affairs department. In 1987 she was selected as SDP candidate for the safe Conservative seat of Chertsey and Walton, and expressed optimism that more women would be returned at the 1988 general election. 'When Mrs Thatcher was made prime minister many women were delighted,' she said, 'But they see her style of government now and her total refusal to promote women as unhelpful.' When the Law Society hired her to blow the dust off its PR in 1989, following the introduction of the 1988 Legal Services Act, which opened up legal services to a wider range of professionals, she jumped at the chance to head a new press and parliamentary unit. She pioneered the Law Society's Make a Will Week annual event, which gave some stuffier members of the profession the vapours when it was launched in 1991. Solicitors were encouraged to don lycra suits and pose as a Superman-style comic book character, 'Will Power' and dispatched to their local supermarkets to hand out promotional literature in a joint project with Safeway. She then launched a battle to save legal aid, in response to the Lord Chancellor's cuts to legal-aid eligibility levels, holding fringe meetings at party conferences and revitalising the Society's network of public relations and parliamentary liaison officers. In 1992 the campaign drew 2,000 solicitors to a lobby of Parliament. Three years later she came up with the idea of National Law Week, 'to show the positive side of the legal profession and to have some fun at the same time'. The first event saw more than 1,500 lawyers donning tracksuits for a three-and-a-half-mile run through the City; others threw open their doors to offer free legal advice, visited schools to explain the law and legal rights to young people, or went abseiling or go-karting, donated blood, or performed on stage to raise funds for charity. In 1972 she worked with the third Doctor, Jon Pertwee (pictured), recalling 'a range of rather louche monsters and some fairly dodgy special effects' - Alamy Shortly after she took up her role at the Law Society, Sue Stapely wrote to her old employers to beg the Archers scriptwriters to inject some professional dynamism into the terminally dull Ambridge solicitor Mark Hebden. She was invited to a meeting, became an adviser – and she remained on board long after Hebden's demise. She advised the scriptwriters on everything from agricultural tenancies, to the creation of the Asian female lawyer Usha Gupta, to the three-month imprisonment of mother-of-two Susan Carter for harbouring her fugitive brother Clive, which inspired the national 'Free the Ambridge One' campaign. 'It all got to a heady peak when I got a call from Michael Howard, who had returned from a trip abroad to be greeted by the constituent who started the campaign, requesting he overturn the sentence,' she recalled. Instead she provided the then Home Secretary details of similar cases, all of which involved equally harsh sentences. A regular contributor to programmes like Any Questions and Woman's Hour, Sue Stapely became famous within the profession for her media relations training courses. After one such event, a practice partner wrote to her to say that while the experience had been stimulating and challenging, '[a certain partner] is, on the whole, as well as can be expected. The men in white coats are optimistic that he will be available to sign letters and file his post within a few days.' In 1994 she published Media Relations for Lawyers (republished and updated in 2003), which included such sage advice as 'Stop pumping out press releases like shotgun blasts'; 'Stop patronising journalists. Some of them aren't as smart as you, but some are even smarter'; and 'Never lie, for as soon as your lies are spotted (and they will be) you will be permanently discredited.' Sue Stapely left the Law Society in 1995 following reports of strained relations with its newly elected president Martin Mears, and moved into reputation management as a director of the consultants Fishburn Hedges. She also did work for Edge International and Quiller Consultants, in addition to running her own consultancy from 2001. That year, suspecting a miscarriage of justice, she offered her help pro bono in co-ordinating media interest in the case of Sally Clark, who had been widely reviled in the media after being found guilty of murdering her two infant sons. The tide began to turn in May 2001 when, following a failed first appeal, the Solicitors Disciplinary Tribunal, in an unprecedented move, decided not to strike Sally Clark off the Roll of Solicitors. Sue Stapely used this decision as a launchpad for discussing a potential miscarriage of justice with the media. Subsequent investigations of the facts in the case and support from individual journalists and medical experts raised questions about the validity of the statistical and medical evidence used in Sally's trial. Then in July 2002, when the news broke that the case had been sent back to the Court of Appeal, Sue Stapely put the brakes on all media activity to ensure that the case was not jeopardised. Silence was maintained until the appeal was heard in January 2003, when Sally Clark's conviction was overturned. Edward Fennell in The Times described Sue Stapely's work on behalf of the campaign as 'outstanding'. Among an extensive CV of voluntary activities, Sue Stapely served as a governor of the Royal Shakespeare Company, chairman of Playground Proms (bringing classical music to schools in deprived areas) and a trustee of the London Academy of Music & Dramatic Art. She was a founding board member of the Media Standards Trust and raised funds for homeless and children's charities. Sue Stapely's marriage was dissolved in 2002, and in 2012 she married David Fitt. He survives her with the two sons of her first marriage. Sue Stapely, born July 11 1946, died April 29 2025 Broaden your horizons with award-winning British journalism. Try The Telegraph free for 1 month with unlimited access to our award-winning website, exclusive app, money-saving offers and more.
