Lisa Osofsky’s lawyers

Lisa Osofsky is the Director of the Serious Fraud Office. Prior to that she was the European monitor of HSBC’s Deferred Prosecution Agreement, begun in 2012 and ending 2017, agreed between the US Department of Justice to avoid prosecution of the bank for laundering money for Mexican drug cartels, terrorists, and breaching sanctions. Lisa was chosen by her employer Exiger for the role. She lives in London with her husband Marc Wesserman. Marc is a partner of US law firm Sidley (previously Sidley Austin) and is based in London.

Marc and Lisa have an HSBC mortgage. and live in a flat in Kensington valued at £3.3m. Lisa’s firm Exiger (according to a Daily Telegraph report I can no longer find) was paid $200m a year to monitor HSBC’s DPA. Lisa’s firm instructed Marc’s firm to advise in the monitoring of HSBC’s DPA. The following colleagues of Marc from Sidley acted on the monitorship. If, as is likely, Marc is an equity partner he will have made a nice pay packet from the HSBC work.

The following lawyers from Sidley have acted for HSBC directly, on other matters. I’m presuming the firm has very robust Chinese Walls.

Meanwhile, another partner at Sidley, Matthew Cahill, who also acted for HSBC, had been charged with tax fraud over a tax evasion scheme devised by HSBC, Zeus Partners. However, all charges against him were dropped by the Crown Prosecution service in February 2018 because of “wholesale failures” by the CPS in the disclosure process and admit criticism that the CPS had failed to investigate HSBC. Two months later Lisa Osofsky had been selected as the new Director of the SFO.