Keeping half an eye on Channel Four’s excellent Business Daily some time back, we were pulled up short when an item on the UK’s Serious Fraud Office focussed in passing on the watchdog’s stationery and revealed that the Office has a very expensive-looking designer logo – the letters SFO tastefully entwined: what possible need does an administrative operation like the Serious Fraud Office have for such a logo? Who is it meant to impress? Is it intended to soften the blow when some suspected fraud receives a Serious letter? The Fraud squaddies are in the watch-dog house again this week as the Daily Telegraph’s City Diary reveals that their telephone system has gone on the blink so successfully that it matches the wildest dreams of chatline addicts – if you call the Serious Fraud number, you get to hear all the conversations going on in the Office – with telephone systems like that, who needs a Freedom of Information act…
