The U.K.’s Serious Fraud Office (SFO) closed its investigation of corruption allegations against Soma Oil & Gas Holdings Ltd. for lack of sufficient evidence, even if there are still reasons to suspect misconduct, the Wall Street Journal reported today. The investigation comes just two months after a London court, doing a judicial review of the case at Soma Oil’s request, ruled that it couldn’t order the SFO to expedite or terminate its investigation into the company. Soma had urged the SFO to resolve its investigation because the uncertainty was a hindrance when it needed to raise fresh financing to meet contractual obligations. The SFO had opened investigations in mid-2015 into allegations that Soma had made “capacity building payments” to the government of Somalia in 2013 to develop oil fields in the country, which had been raised in a report from the United Nations Somalia and Eritrea Monitoring Group. The company, which is privately owned and was set up expressly to pursue oil and gas exploration in Somalia, cooperated fully with the investigation and vigorously denied wrongdoing.
