Insights

One of the world’s top poker players, Phil Ivey has lost his Supreme Court appeal against Genting Casinos in which he averred he was entitled to £7.7 million in winnings which the casino has been holding for five years. In a ruling which has changed the law, the five-judge bench in Ivey v Genting Casinos UK Ltd t/a Crockfords [2017] UKSC 67, decided that the US professional Poker Player had been cheating and, that his conduct, contrary to his own opinion, was dishonest.

I am now a few weeks into my time in Uganda, and it has been a thoroughly enjoyable trip, enriched by the interesting people I have met and experiences I have encountered. I have learned that in Uganda I am referred to as Salongo (the father of twins). The mother of twins is Nalongo and the twins themselves are Balongo. I am beginning to develop an understanding of how the legal system works in Uganda, but there is still much to learn about the reality of the system on the ground.

In a news release published on 10 April 2018, the Serious Fraud Office (SFO) announced its intention to use artificial intelligence in all new investigations. The organisation said its new AI system, which automates document analysis, will scan millions of documents and be able to detect patterns, remove duplicates, group information by topic and eventually sift for relevance. The new ‘robot’ was trialled in the Rolls-Royce case to detect material that might attract legal professional privilege in around 30 million documents. This was the first criminal case in the UK to make use of AI, and it was hailed a success by the SFO.

Last month, EY published its 15^th Global Fraud Survey, Integrity in the Spotlight – the future of compliance. The results are damning. Despite more active enforcement, amounting to over $11bn of penalties imposed by regulators and law enforcement agencies worldwide, there has been no improvement in the scale of bribery and corruption since 2012. In the UK, levels seem to be on the rise, even though the UK Bribery Act, which introduced much stronger anti-bribery laws and has been described as one of the toughest pieces of anti-corruption legislation in the world, came into force in 2011.