The woman fighting a £14bn-a-year battle

ROS WRIGHT sounds only a little regretful when she admits: 'We've not got any major scalps this year.'

Britain's chief fraudbuster has had a pretty good year despite that. The Serious Fraud Office director has secured convictions in 10 out of 13 cases and continued the rehabilitation of an institution derided as the 'Serious Farce Office' for most of the 1990s.

Two of the defendants in the most high-profile case, the Co-op fraud trial, have been jailed and the key defendant, Andrew Regan, is due to face a retrial in January after the jury failed to reach a verdict. Meanwhile, the long-running Wickes trial continues, while investigations into Independent Insurance and Versailles go on apace.

One 'major disappointment' was the Morgan Grenfell case, in which fund manager Peter Young was judged unfit to stand trial, one co-defendant was acquitted and the other told there was no case to answer. Mentally-ill Young, who lives at home but attends a day hospital, could still stand trial if he recovers, Wright says. Nevingertheless, it is all much more heartening than the mid-1990s when the SFO suffered a string of disappointments, including the acquittal of the Maxwell brothers and Brent Walker boss George Walker, the overturning of the Blue Arrow verdicts and the sentencing of investment fraudster Roger Levitt to a mere 180 hours' community service. To cap it all, Asil Nadir of Polly Peck fame jumped bail.

Morale has improved since then. In April, Wright sat in the second-floor control room of SFO headquarters off Gray's Inn Road and helped co-ordinate 27 simultaneous raids by 250 police officers and officials on offices and homes across the country in a massive investigation into alleged fraud by drug suppliers to the NHS. 'It was like something out of a film,' she says.

The usual gripes continue to plague the SFO, in particular the shortage of police officers available to help with investigations. The emphasis on fight-terrorism post-11 September has diverted still more resources away from fraud, which costs Britain an estimated £14bn a year.

And the SFO, whose annual report is published today, expects to be busier than ever. The slump in stock markets is bound to bring more corporate failures, which will reveal wrongdoing. 'You'll certainly see some false accounting and fraudulent trading,' says Wright, a former barrister. She has already conducted an unofficial investigation into split-capital investment trusts.

One reform that will make life easier is the proposal in the criminal justice White Paper this week to end the requirement for trial by jury in complex-fraud cases, which Wright welcomes. It should lead to shorter, more manageable trials, a greater ability to show the big picture and more-reasoned verdicts, she argues.

Complex fraud trials last for months. The trial of former Wickes chairman Henry Sweetbaum and others, for example, began in January and is not expected to end until October.

The notion of a 'jury of peers' is inaccurate for middle class professional fraudsters, Wright argues. Jurors prepared to give up the time for fraud trials tend to be the unemployed, school leavers, the retired and housewives. 'Are they really the peers of the chap being tried?' she asks.

'To get a jury to sit through the tedium month after month is a form of Chinese water torture,' she adds.

Headhunters are now being appointed to find a successor to Wright. She declines to say how she will spend her retirement but does not rule out a book of memoirs. 'I never kept a diary,' she says. 'That was a big mistake. But I have a good memory.'