Regrettably, it's plainly going to take time.Two swallows do not a summer make and the Serious Fraud Office's two notable successes in the courts this week won't of themselves redeem this beleaguered organisation. None the less, the SFO has shown skill and some cunning in bringing the dreadful Abbas Gokal to book over the BCCI collapse.Everyone tends to forget that the BCCI affair was the world's largest fraud, but after an initial burst of saturation coverage plus some good old-fashioned Bank of England bashing, the press rather lost interest in the whole thing The reason for this is a rather unsavoury one. Not to put too fine a point on it, it was because those involved in the fraud and affected by it were largely people with funny sounding foreign names that nobody had ever heard of.Most of us had heard of Mr Gokal, however, for he was a flamboyant figure on the London and international scene. Quite where the SFO got the information it needed to haul him off a secret flight from Pakistan to the US while on a Frankfurt stopover is something of a mystery, but it was a master stroke none the less, enabling one of the world's biggest thieves to be brought to justice.. The much-derided Serious Fraud Office (SFO) won two landmark court room cases this week, sending hotelier Robert Feld to jail for eight years and convicting Abbas Gokal in the world's biggest fraud case. But will this be enough to silence the SFO's legion of critics? Ever since its founding in the 1980s as the agency to clean up big business frauds, the SFO has rocked from one failure to the next. There were howls of outrage when Roger Levitt was convicted of fraud and sentenced to just 180 hours' community service. And there was even greater public disillusionment when Kevin and Ian Maxwell were acquitted after an eight-month trial that cost the taxpayer more than pounds 20m.There was no disguising the delight at the SFO's Elm Street offices this week following the double win.

"It's been a great week for the SFO," declared Chris Dickson, case controller for the prosecution of Gokal for $1.2bn of fraud.The SFO's line is that its future was already assured before this week's successes. They point to the Davy Report two years ago which was accepted by both the Government and the Opposition, which backed the SFO in its present form.But then came Maxwell, and the old criticisms were aired once again. Was the SFO's structure, using teams of accountants, solicitors and police the right one? Was the evidence produced at trials too complicated for juries to understand? Were the SFO's special powers to require people to produce documents and answer questions too draconian? Would it not be best to just accept that the SFO had failed, and merge into another body such as the Crown Prosecution service or a new financial regulator?George Staple, the litigation lawyer from Clifford Chance who retires this month as head of the SFO to make way for Rosalinde Wright (previously of the Securities and Futures Authority), admits that Maxwell was a big set-back. But he points out that the SFO has a duty to prosecute all cases of serious fraud where there is even a reasonable chance of success. He points to press criticism of the Crown Prosecution Service's failure to prosecute certain cases where the evidence is not water-tight.Losing a case does not necessarily mean it was wrong to bring it, he insists. He is delighted at the two successes this week, particularly in terms of the large numbers of victims involved. "But I think the SFO has already shown that it is prosecuting big cases.

It's a very effective organisation."The public's despair at the SFO's fumbling of previous cases like Maxwell, which led some fellow-investigators to dub it "the Serious Farce Office", is surprisingly at odds with perceptions inside many financial regulators.One regulator commented yesterday: "Inside the regulatory system the SFO is seen as quite successful, and that this success is largely unsung. Obviously the Maxwell and Levitt cases were seen as unsuccessful. But I think on the whole George Staple deserves credit for what he has achieved.". European finance ministers and central bankers are meeting in Noordwijk this weekend to discuss the future of the single currency after a quiet week for EMU speculation in the financial markets. But it was nevertheless a significant week on the single currency front.

Bruce Kasman of JP Morgan said: "This week may turn out to have been the week in which the wave of EMU pessimism crested." German data on manufacturing orders and industrial production were surprisingly positive, reinforcing the view that German growth is bouncing back and that delay might be less likely after all. As a result our graph shows bond yields for Italy and Spain converging on Germany once more.Chancellor Helmut Kohl's announcement that he will be standing for re-election caused little market response but analysts claimed it was extremely important.Mr Kasman commented: "It takes one of the major risks out of the system.". Queensborough Holdings, the leisure group in effect controlled by Kevin Leech, the biotechnology multi-millionaire, yesterday moved to damp expectations that it was ready to bid for a restaurant chain as it announced its first dividend and profit for 13 years. Speculation about a possible acquisition grew in February after the group appointed Michael Guthrie, the man behind the Brightreasons restaurant group, with a brief to build up a new "leisure dining" leg for the business. But in the wake of the sale by Whitbread, Brightreasons' new owner, of its Pizza Piazza chain to management for pounds 11.25m last month, Queensborough was yesterday suggesting that prices had got a little out of hand.Philip Mason, who joined the group as chief executive in 1995 from Marina Developments, said they had been looking at other groups, but the price- earnings multiples had been too high."We are not prepared to pay heady price-earnings ratios. Anything around the 17 to 18 mark."Mr Guthrie's brief is to add organic growth to Queensborough's existing mature businesses of caravan parks and day visitor attractions, building up its own brand and its own p/e, according to Mr Mason.They were looking at the Italian food sector in a town centre format, with the typical restaurant size around 150 covers.The model was Pizza Express, where the typical spend is pounds 10 a head, rather than Pizzaland, where it is more like pounds 6.His comments came as Queensborough announced that pre-tax profits of pounds 3.59m replaced losses of pounds 996,000 in the year to January, thought to be the first time since the company went public in 1984 that it had been in the black.A maiden dividend of 0.3p is being paid from earnings per share of 2.95p.The results came after a year in which the group has transformed itself through over pounds 45m of acquisitions.As well as 13 caravan parks in the UK, which have turned it into the country's third-largest operator, the group now owns six day visitor attractions, including Cheddar Gorge and the Needles, and two caravan parks in France.Mr Mason said that after an increase in values in the UK, prices of parks were now much more attractive across the Channel, where the yields are similar.Queensborough is expected to announce within the next week that it is buying another park in France from receivers.Caravans chipped in operating profits of pounds 2.6m last year, mostly from acquisitions during the year.The visitor attractions added pounds 1.75m, including pounds 1m from Pleasurewood Hills, near Lowestoft, picked up a year ago, while the Hotel Burstin in Folkestone chipped in a maiden pounds 1.3m.Gearing of 80 per cent is expected to fall to 66 per cent by the year- end. Four directors increased their shareholdings in the group yesterday, with Mr Leech lifting his stake from 29.4 to 29.9 per cent.. Oils, after a gushing performance, are under pressure as crude prices hit a nine month low.