OUTSOURCING giant Serco has agreed to pay nearly £23 million in fines to the Serious Fraud Office (SFO) after it overcharged the government for electronically tagging offenders.

SFO director Lisa Osofsky said Serco had “engaged in a concerted effort to lie to the Ministry of Justice in order to profit unlawfully at the expense of UK taxpayers.”

At the height of the scandal, which emerged in 2013, Serco was accused of tagging dead people.

The company’s subsidiary, Serco Geografix, has now admitted responsibility to three incidents of under-reporting profits on the contract.

But the SFO has agreed not to press charges under a deal that will cost Serco £19.2m in fines and £3.7m in costs.

The fine would have cost twice as much had Serco not self-reported the issue and co-operated with investigators.

Serco chief executive, Winston Churchill’s grandson Rupert Soames, said he was “mortified” and claimed the company had “changed beyond all recognition” since he took over in the wake of the tagging scandal.

He said: “Those of us who now run the business are mortified, embarrassed and angry that, in a period between six and nine years ago, Serco understated the level of profitability of its electronic monitoring contract in its reports to the Ministry of Justice.

“Serco apologised unreservedly at the time, and we do so again.”

The humiliating fine comes amid a turbulent week for the company in which it was implicated in the death of prisoner Rafal Sochacki.

The 43-year-old man was cooked to death while held in an unventilated court cell in central London during a heatwave in June 2017.

Yesterday the Prison and Probation Ombudsman (PPO) described his death as “very disturbing” and asked authorities to scrutinise Serco’s “apparent non-compliance” with its Ministry of Justice (MoJ) prisoner transport contract.

While Mr Soames is keen to move on from the scandal his company will now have to deal with eight recommendations made by the PPO, aimed at improving its handling of prisoner transport after Mr Sochacki’s death.

He died from severe heat exhaustion after a Serco prisoner van held him for 50 minutes with the engine turned off on one of the hottest days of the year.

He was driven to Westminster Magistrates’ Court where he arrived sweating in sodden clothes.

Despite the court’s air conditioning being broken, staff bundled him into a holding cell where police later estimated temperatures reached 40º Celsius.

An independent clinical expert said Mr Sochacki’s time in the overheated van and cell would have been “significant” factors in his death.

Labour’s shadow justice secretary Richard Burgon said nationalisation was the solution.
 
“Time after time we see the disastrous consequences of these outsourcing giants playing such a major role in our justice system.
 
“The dangerous privatisation of probation, the disproportionate levels of violence in private prisons and the offender tagging scandal all show it really is time to break the hold that the private sector has at the Ministry of Justice.
 
“We need a justice system that prioritises public safety, not private profit.”

RMT general secretary Mick Cash said: “Once again, Serco, the specialists in failure, have been found out.”

He called on the government to “think twice about using private companies to deliver essential public services.”