Oligarchs Turn Prosecution into a Cat-and-Mouse Game With SFO Lawyers Under Surveillance

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Former prosecutors from the UK’s Serious Fraud Office (SFO) – the people who once led major investigations into corruption and corporate crime – have found themselves on the receiving end of covert surveillance.

According to a newspaper report the spying was organised by figures linked to a multinational under scrutiny by the SFO. It’s a revelation that’s prompted calls for urgent reform of how the UK regulates private intelligence work.

What Happened?

Q: Why were former SFO lawyers placed under surveillance?
A: A 2025 Guardian investigation found UK oligarchs linked to ENRC hired ex-military operatives to monitor former SFO prosecutors, seeking “leverage” and exploiting the UK’s lack of regulation over private investigators.

A Guardian investigation has peeled back the curtain on a truly cinematic operation. Former SFO prosecutors—including Tom Martin, Mike Walsh, James Coussey, and John Gibson—found themselves under surveillance organised by Dmitry Vozianov and carried out by Blue Square Global, a firm run by an ex-parachute regiment veteran.

Martin said that if operatives were seeking “kompromat”, the Russian term for compromising material that can be used to apply pressure, there was nothing to find, except perhaps his passion for model trains.

“It’s an attack on the rule of law,” he said. “You’re not trying to defend yourself in a court, you’re trying to shift the odds in your favour.”

Tom Martin, The Guardian

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This wasn’t some bored private eye in a Ford Mondeo; it was targeted, well-resourced, and entirely outside the remit of any regulatory oversight.

The operation, reportedly commissioned by interests linked to Eurasian Natural Resources Corporation, appeared designed to gather “leverage”, which is polite code for dirt.

In practice, that meant shadowing prosecutors at home, in car parks, and even during off-duty nights out. It’s one thing to cross-examine someone in court; it’s quite another to skulk in the shadows outside their local.

The problem in the UK is that there’s effectively nothing stopping this. There is no licence to be yanked, no formal oversight body to answer to. Private investigators are free to follow former prosecutors like they’re auditioning for the next John le Carré adaptation.

Members of Parliament are already sharpening their knives, sensing an opportunity for reform—not, of course, because they’re shocked, but because the target list now includes the legal establishment rather than just the “ordinary” public. And if there’s one thing the British political class can unite over, it’s protecting its own.