The Court of Appeal’s judgment in R v Osmond[1] is the first appellate authority on the tipping off offence found at section 333A(3) of the Proceeds of Crime Act 2002 (POCA). It confirms, in short order, that a regulated professional cannot rely on the notoriety of a wider investigation to justify telling a client about a narrower, undisclosed strand of it, and that it makes no difference that the ‘tip’ came from the investigating authority itself.
Background
William Osmond, a solicitor and the senior partner of his own firm, acted for a long-standing client, James Ramsay, in connection with a 2013 transaction in which Ramsay lent £4 million (routed through an offshore vehicle) towards the £8 million purchase of a Mayfair property. Osmond handled the incorporation of the offshore lender and the loan documentation, and the loan monies passed through his firm’s client account.
That transaction later came to the attention of the Serious Fraud Office (SFO) during a long-running and well-publicised investigation into Eurasian Natural Resources Corporation Limited (ENRC). Ramsay was not himself a suspect, but the purchaser of the Mayfair property was connected to a suspect in the ENRC investigation. In June 2018, an SFO investigator telephoned Osmond seeking information about the Mayfair transaction. The investigator told Osmond that the SFO would be requiring him to answer questions and provide documents about the purchase of the property and explained that it had suspicions about the £4 million which had passed through Osmond’s client account, including whether this was money laundering.
The SFO subsequently sent Osmond a formal notice under section 2 of the Criminal Justice Act 1987. The notice was headed ‘Investigation into the affairs of [ENRC] and other’. Its range was much wider than the Mayfair transaction and required production of all client files responsive to some 85 names, as well as answers to specific questions. For example, the SFO wanted to know what explanation Ramsay had given for providing half the purchase price of the Mayfair property. The covering letter required Osmond to treat the request for information as confidential and referred expressly to the tipping off offence.
The day after that call, Osmond told Ramsay about the SFO’s approach. He subsequently met with Ramsay and had numerous further exchanges with him over the following weeks about how the SFO’s questions should be answered.
Osmond’s conviction
Section 333A(3) of the POCA creates a criminal offence where three elements are all made out. First, the person discloses that an investigation into allegations that an offence under Part 7 of POCA has been committed is being contemplated or is being carried out. Second, that disclosure is likely to prejudice the investigation in question. Third, the information on which the disclosure was based came to the person in the course of a business in the regulated sector.
A person convicted of the offence is liable, on summary conviction, to imprisonment for up to three months and/or a fine not exceeding level 5 on the standard scale, or, on conviction on indictment, to imprisonment for up to two years and/or an unlimited fine.
Osmond’s defence turned on two propositions:
- That the wider ENRC investigation was already public knowledge and known to Ramsay, so nothing capable of amounting to a “disclosure” had occurred.
- That the information he passed on had come to him from the SFO itself, in his capacity as a solicitor responding to a statutory notice, rather than in the course of a regulated business.
The trial judge rejected both propositions in pre-trial rulings, and he was convicted of tipping off.
The Court of Appeal’s judgment
The Court of Appeal agreed when considering whether to grant leave to appeal.
On Osmond’s first proposition, the court held that an investigation can be the subject of a disclosure under section 333A(3) even where it forms a strand within, or an aspect of, a wider investigation whose existence is public knowledge. The prosecution’s case was confined to the SFO’s inquiry into the Mayfair transaction specifically – which was not known to Ramsay. The court considered it quite obvious that the statutory purpose of the tipping off offence would be frustrated if a defendant could escape liability for revealing a specific, unknown line of inquiry simply because the broader investigation of which it formed part had already made headlines.
On Osmond’s second proposition, the court held that section 333A(3)(c) looks to the capacity in which the defendant received the information, not its source. Osmond was undoubtedly conducting business in the regulated sector, having acted for Ramsay in a property transaction involving the acquisition of an offshore vehicle and the handling of client money. That the SFO itself was the immediate source of the information he passed on to Ramsay did not take the disclosure outside the section; if anything, the court noted, that is precisely the scenario the provision is aimed at, since the source of such information will typically be the investigating agency.
The Court of Appeal also confirmed, in rejecting a submission of no case to answer, that the prosecution need only establish that a disclosure was ‘likely’ to prejudice an investigation at the time it was made. There is no requirement to prove actual prejudice with hindsight, and it is no defence that no prejudice in fact resulted. The court went further, observing that disclosure of an investigation to its target is inherently likely to prejudice it, given the obvious risks of evidence being compromised or the individual seeking to evade justice.
Leave to appeal was refused, but because this was the first case on section 333A(3) to reach the Court of Appeal, the court gave leave for the judgment to be cited.
Key takeaways
This case gives regulated professionals two clear rules of thumb.
First, publicity is not a safe harbour. Knowing that a client, or someone connected to a client, is aware of some wider investigation does not license disclosure of a narrower or more specific line of inquiry that remains confidential. Each strand of an investigation can form the basis of its own tipping off liability.
Second, the offence is not concerned with where the information came from. A professional who learns of an investigation directly from the investigating authority, while responding in their professional capacity to a statutory notice, is squarely within scope; the offence exists precisely to stop that information travelling from investigator to suspect via the professional in the middle.
Where any doubt exists, professionals in a regulated sector should seek advice before responding to an enforcement agency or discussing a (potential) investigation with a client.
[1] [2026] EWCA Crim 979.
Contributors
Ben Sharrock-Mason