A
Metropolitan Police chief, Sir Bernard Hogan-Howe, will be grilled by
Members of Parliament this week over allegations that Scotland Yard and
the Crown Prosecution Service were involved in a ‘‘deliberate cover-up’’
of damning evidence of police corruption on former Delta State
Governor, James Ibori case.
According to the Daily Mail newspaper,
a court was told that the Met and the CPS repeatedly concealed
documents suggesting that officers, investigating a former Delta State
Governor, James Ibori, for fraud, were paid to leak details of the
inquiry that could have helped him evade justice in 2012.
The extraordinary case centres on
Scotland Yard’s prosecution of James Ibori, who once worked as a cashier
at a branch of Wickes DIY store in West London before becoming Delta
State governor.
Ibori is currently serving a 13-year
jail term for money laundering in a UK prison as well as his lawyer, who
was also jailed for seven years after admitting fraud, although he
claimed he was wrongly advised to do so by his then legal team.
One detective was said to have received
at least 19 unexplained cash deposits, totaling thousands of pounds,
into his bank account after illegally disclosing sensitive information, a
judge heard.
But when the corruption allegations were
revealed by a whistle-blowing lawyer, Bhadresh Gohil, he was accused of
forging the evidence and charged with perverting the course of justice.
Police privately expressed fears that his devastating claims could undermine the £50m fraud trial.
Last month, the charges against the
lawyer were dramatically dropped after the CPS was forced to produce
crucial papers, which it had always insisted did not exist, that suggest
serving Met officers took bribes.
The CPS’s handling of the case,
criticised by former police as well as the defendants, will also
increase pressure on Director of Public Prosecutions Alison Saunders,
who faced calls to quit over her failure to put Lord Janner on trial.
The Daily Mail further reports
that a Met Commander, Peter Spindler, who reported directly to
Hogan-Howie, told the BBC the corruption claims were bogus without
having checked if documents were genuine.
Gohil told The Mail on Sunday,
“I uncovered serious corruption, but when I tried to expose this, I was
victimised. Astonishingly, the CPS used the might of the state and all
its resources to cover up what had happened, and brought trumped-up
charges to persecute me. The truth has finally unravelled.”
The chairman of the Home Affairs
Committee, Keith Vaz, said, “Members have indicated they will want to
ask the Commissioner, when he next appears before the committee, to deal
with the latest developments which raise a number of new questions.”
No comments:
Post a Comment