As we reported here, last week Munir Patel became the first person to be sentenced for an offence under the new Bribery Act…. The facts are well-known but here they are in brief: on the bribery charge, Mr Patel accepted cash in return for not putting details of someone’s traffic offence on a court database; on the wider misconduct, for over a year, he assisted those guilty of other road traffic crimes to avoid their fines, driving disqualifications or the imposition of penalty points on their licences, involving at least 53 separate cases….What does the case tell us more widely about how the Courts will approach the new Act? Very little. To suggest it should be a greater warning sign for a corporate wrongdoer or an agnostic company director is going too far; and even on a black letter law basis, it does not offer us a reliable marker of how other cases under the Bribery Act will be treated by the courts.
