Britain’s Serious Fraud Office (SFO) on Friday secured a £10 million payment from defense contractor Ultra Electronics after the company accepted responsibility for failure to prevent bribery, the agency said in a statement, with a London judge approving a deferred prosecution agreement (DPA) that also requires the company to cover £4.8 million in SFO investigation costs.

The SFO said both sums must be paid within 30 days, and that the deal concludes its criminal investigation into the company, a British manufacturer of electronic systems for the international defense and aerospace market. 

The DPA relates to three public-sector contracts that Ultra pursued through the use of agents, the SFO said. They include a contract worth up to £200 million awarded by Oman’s Ministry of Transport and Communications, and two unsuccessful bids in Algeria: one for information technology and e-commerce solutions at Houari Boumediene Airport in Algiers and another for encryption technology for the Algerian Ministry of Post and Telecommunications. The Algerian contracts had been expected to generate £1.4 million in profit, the agency said.

According to the SFO, the investigation was opened in 2018 after Ultra self-reported suspected corruption offenses linked to its conduct in Algeria. It was broadened in 2024 to cover all jurisdictions in which the company operated. The inquiry was first extended to Oman in 2023 before being widened further the following year, the Financial Times said. 

Beyond the financial penalty, the agreement requires Ultra to meet strict conditions and demonstrate “genuine and sustained reform under the scrutiny of the court,” the SFO said, including yearly reports over the next three years on the effectiveness of its anti-bribery and compliance program.

The SFO disclosed that it had previously walked away from negotiations with Ultra after concluding the conditions for a meaningful agreement were not in place, and that talks resumed only after significant changes to the company’s ownership, structure, and leadership convinced the agency that new management was willing and able to engage in good faith. 

Ultra was part of the FTSE 250 until August 1, 2022, when it was taken private by U.S. private equity firm Advent, the agency said. The Financial Times reported that Advent then merged Ultra with another of its UK defense acquisitions, Cobham, to form Cobham Ultra.

Friday’s deal is the 13th DPA the SFO has entered into since the mechanism was introduced in the UK in 2014, joining earlier resolutions with Rolls-Royce, Airbus, and security company G4S, according to the FT. The newspaper said the agency’s recently departed director, Nick Ephgrave, had championed DPAs as a pragmatic way to avoid lengthy trials while returning money to the taxpayer.

Helen Taylor, deputy director of the campaign group Spotlight on Corruption, told the paper that the deal “sends an important signal to those in the defense industry tempted to cut corners to secure lucrative public contracts,” but warned that “with a financial penalty that represents just a fraction of the company’s profits, there is a serious risk that multinational defense giants will . . . factor such penalties into the cost of doing business in a high-risk, high-reward sector.”