NOT 4 ATTRIBUTION

RIP Stephen Crouch. Top source, fine man.

2015-03-06T09:45:00.001+00:00

Stephen Crouch

Crouch was likened to a character out of a John le Carré novel

Crouch was likened to a character out of a John le Carré novel

Last updated at 8:41PM, March 4 2015

Enigmatic lobbyist whose suspected links with the security services were, unusually, forcefully denied by the Foreign Office

In April 1991, with the dust settling on the first Gulf War and a series of bloody uprisings raging in northern and southern Iraq, Stephen Crouch was camped out in the Turkish town of Cizre
The bleak outpost, perched precariously on the border with both Syria and Iraq, and surrounded on three sides by the River Tigris, was a forward operating base for British and American military observers watching which way the wind would blow for Saddam Hussein. While most of the foreigners who arrived in the Kurdish town that spring had a predefined role in the unfolding drama, no one quite knew why Crouch was there.
He attended press conferences, even asking questions, but he was not a journalist. He wore camouflage, but, with his rolling gait and loud, easy laugh, he was not a military man. Some got the impression that he was a spy, but, while there was much speculation that he was on the payroll of MI6, the CIA or some private military contractor, it was never really clear who he was working for — if anybody.
When later Crouch was named as a mysterious “defence lobbyist” in the fall out surrounding the resignation of the Conservative defence secretary Dr Liam Fox in 2011, the questions arose again, who was he and who was paying him? Seemingly cut from the pages of an Evelyn Waugh novel, his persona was one of the upper crust, slightly out of place, Englishman abroad. A larger than life character, the twinkle in his eye, ready smile, booming voice and studied bumbling manner, won over many of those he met, including his many contacts in Iraq, Libya and Syria, who seemingly forgave his self-taught and rather atrocious Arabic, which was spoken loudly with an English public school accent.
Following his death, one key contact, a former Lebanese intelligence officer, described him as “the top diplomat and negotiator of complex issues . . . he understood the Middle East better than any desk officer and knew what needed to be done by heart.” He added: “There are many novels [by] John le Carré, behind the scenes; he was the real thing.”
Crouch had many friends and even more acquaintances, and could pick up the phone to senior figures in the State Department and Foreign Office, later opening a Middle East consultancy alongside a former MI6 officer and a former British ambassador to Iraq.
The illegitimate son of Pierre Plantard de Saint-Clair, a forger behind the Priory of Sion hoax through which he claimed to be the heir to the French crown, young Crouch and his mother and stepfather emigrated to New Zealand where he spent many of his early years “running wild” on a sheep farm; he was brought home to England at the age of 15 and sent to Malvern School. When the school failed to tame him he was expelled, spending several years wandering around Turkey and developing his love of the Muslim world.
By 1991, he had been in the thick of the fighting in northern Iraq, with photographs showing him carrying a machinegun surrounded by heavily armed Kurdish fighters and blond-haired “special forces” troops. Pictures also show him taking notes from Jalal Talabani, one of the Kurdish independence leaders who became president of Iraq after the fall of Saddam Hussein.
At about this time, the Foreign Office took the unusual step of denying that Crouch had anything to do with them or the Secret Intelligence Service, MI6.
Working as British co-ordinator for the Kurdish Reconstruction Office, badgering the West for help, Crouch was dubbed, with affection by some, as “Lawrence of Kurdistan”. But, having fallen out with the new Kurdish leadership, his friends in Whitehall were quick to abandon him and he was forced to deny he had “passed himself off” as a British official. Back in Britain, Crouch played some unspecified role in Northern Ireland, later hinting that he had some deniable part in the early negotiations with the IRA that led to the Good Friday Agreement in 1998.
Certainly, from time to time, several, slightly unsavoury characters who played a covert role in the Troubles would make an appearance at Crouch’s south London flat. There he would entertain them with copious bottles of red wine, while probing them for information, surrounded by artefacts from his travels, including countless Persian carpets and a silver revolver of dubious origin that took pride of place on the mantelpiece.
At about the same time, he began working with the government of Kuwait, attempting to locate treasures and antiquities looted from the country during the first Gulf War. Dick Ellis, former head of the Scotland Yard art and antiquities squad, said Crouch came to him with information on a Lebanese and Jordanian network involved in marketing looted Kuwaiti cultural objects. As a result, police raided an apartment at the Dorchester Hotel and recovered objects worth more than £1 million, including a royal prayer mat. For Ellis, it was the start of a long and successful association.
Crouch also ran the Iraqi British Interest Group (IBI), a lobbying group that ran foul of the Iraqi National Congress, which was seen as Iraq’s government in exile. Suspicious of his activities, it said: “Crouch is acting as a middleman for businessmen who are trying to rehabilitate Saddam’s regime. Once you start dealing with them and pursuing contracts you are saying they are going to be around to implement those contracts so you are giving legitimacy to the regime.”
Later that year questions were asked in the House of Commons about Crouch’s role after it was disclosed that the Foreign Office’s overseas development office was funding a medical project he was running in northern Iraq.
By 2010, Crouch had branched out into mainstream politics, taking over as chairman of the Carmarthen West and South Pembrokeshire Conservative Association, near his then home in the Welsh constituency. Again he was embroiled in controversy. Simon Hart, a former chief executive of the Countryside Alliance, successfully fought the marginal seat for the Tories. Crouch was active in the campaign, but after the election, having returned to the shadows, he faced questions about political donations that he had secured.
In the years that followed, Crouch returned to the Middle East, continuing his efforts to bring British business and expertise to Iraq, where many of his long-time friends and allies found themselves in key government posts, and established the Iraq Research Group (IRG), alongside two former UK diplomats.
When Fox found himself at the centre of a scandal over his relationship with the lobbyist Adam Werritty, who had been allowed access to the Ministry of Defence, Crouch was caught in the crossfire. After Dr Fox’s resignation, it was disclosed that IRG had reportedly donated £20,000 to Werritty’s lobbying company, and that arrangements had allegedly been made for Werritty and Crouch to meet the minister responsible for the arms trade. Crouch insisted that the meeting was unconnected with his donation.
He was married three times. His first wife was Mireille, with whom he had a daughter, Ingrid; his second wife was Princess Marie, who had Kurdish “royal” ancestry. He is survived by his third wife, Miranda, who is a successful writer, and Ingrid, who manages a shop.
Crouch was killed after he was hit by a car while out walking his dogs near his home in Midhurst, Sussex. To the end, he remained an enigma.

Stephen Crouch, lobbyist, was born on January 25, 1955. He died on February 7, 2015, aged 60

Innocent in Guantanamo

2014-05-27T11:56:00.000+01:00

AL QAEDA GENERAL...OR JUST A CHEF WHO COOKED THE BEST FISH IN LONDON?

BY JASON LEWIS

26 February 2006

The Mail on Sunday

AN alleged Al Qaeda ' general' held at the Guantanamo Bay terror suspect camp was working as a chef in London when America says he was training to be an assassin in Afghanistan, it is claimed.

Cooked up charges? Chef or "The General", Ahmed Errachidi

Evidence obtained by The Mail on Sunday casts serious doubt on US allegations that Ahmed Errachidi was fighting alongside Osama Bin Laden in the months before the September 11 attacks.

The revelation comes as international pressure mounts on President Bush to close the camp in Cuba after a highly critical UN report about its treatment of prisoners.

Errachidi, a 38-year-old Moroccan who has worked in London restaurants for 18 years and whose fish dishes have been described by one food critic as 'the best I have ever tasted', has been held in Guantanamo for four years - much of that time in solitary confinement - after being arrested in Pakistan.

He has told his lawyers that he was accused of being an Al Qaeda fighter after an unnamed intelligence source said he had attended terrorist courses at the Al Farouq camp near Kandahar, Afghanistan, where four of the 9/11 hijackers are alleged to have been trained.

He is accused of receiving specialist training at the camp in July 2001 in weapons handling, war tactics and bombmaking. However, documents obtained independently by this newspaper show that at the time Errachidi was working as a chef at the five-star Westbury Hotel in Mayfair.

Shown a photograph of the imprisoned man by the The Mail on Sunday, fellow chef Fabrice Guillon said: 'I remember him. We definitely worked together two or three times while I was at the Westbury Hotel in July 2001. I feel it is important that I speak out. If he is innocent, then he shouldn't be being held where he is.'

Last night Errachidi's lawyer, human rights specialist Clive Stafford Smith, claimed he had other evidence including bank records to suggest his client was in Britain at the time.

Mr Stafford Smith is now demanding Errachidi's immediate release. He said: 'Fortunately we can prove that whoever said he was at the Al Farouq training camp is a liar.'

Mr Stafford Smith's new evidence raises doubts over other US allegations against Errachidi.

He has been accused of regularly attending the jailed cleric Abu Hamza's Finsbury Park Mosque in London alongside other alleged terrorists including shoe bomber Richard Reid.

It is also claimed he was a member of an Al Qaeda-linked Moroccan terror group that allegedly carried out reconnaissance missions in New York before 9/11.

On September 18, 2001, a week after the terrorist attacks in New York and Washington, Errachidi left London to visit his wife and children in Morocco.

He says he intended to fly on to Pakistan to try to set up a business venture to raise money for a heart operation for his one-year-old son Imran.

Errachidi insists that he abandoned the idea when he heard on the news that America was bombing Afghanistan and went there instead, intending to help women and children caught up in the fighting.

But he claims after less than a month in the country it had become too dangerous and he decided to leave. Errachidi says he then headed for Pakistan, where he was detained by the police. After several weeks in jail he claims he was taken to Islamabad and turned over to the Americans.

They took him to the American prison camp at Bagram airbase in Afghanistan, where, according to his lawyer, a sign on the door of the interrogation room said 'Janaham' - meaning 'Hell' in Arabic.

Mr Stafford Smith noted: 'Mr Errachidi spent the next 26 days being tortured and interrogated in Hell.'

After his transfer to Guantanamo Bay it is claimed the American interrogators took a special interest in Errachidi.

According to a lawyer's submission to American authorities: 'Mr Errachidi was dubbed "The General" by US forces. The idea he played any role in terrorism, let alone with the rank of "The General", is absurd. He received the "rank" because he would stand up for other prisoners who were being abused.'

During his four years at Guantanamo Errachidi has spent almost half of it in solitary confinement, longer than any other prisoner there.

Last night Whitehall security sources urged 'caution' in connection with the case.

GUARDS FORCED ME INTO THE TORTURE CHAIR AND SHACKLED ME. AN OFFICER SAID I HAD INCITED A HUNGER STRIKE.'YOU ARE BEING PUNISHED FOR THIS'

BY JASON LEWIS WHITEHALL CORRESPONDENT

9 April 2006

AN alleged Al Qaeda terrorist held at Guantanamo Bay - who says he was working as a London chef when the CIA claim he was training to be an assassin - has gone on hunger strike.

Ahmed Errachidi is starving himself in protest at his treatment at the US detention camp and the refusal of the British Government to intervene on his behalf.

Errachidi, a 38-year-old Moroccan who has worked in London for 18 years, has been accused of being an Al Qaeda fighter who had attended terrorist courses at the Al Farouq camp near Kandahar, Afghanistan. However, employment records show that at the time, Errachidi was working as a chefin the Westbury Hotel in London's Mayfair.

A UK resident rather than a passport holder, Errachidi is one of several Guantanamo prisoners whom the Foreign Office refuses to help.

Last week his lawyer, Clive Stafford Smith, handed The Mail on Sunday a statement from Mr Errachidi - which has been declassified by US authorities and which we reproduce in part below - explaining why he has gone on hunger strike.

'I AM a British resident. I have lived in London for about 18 years. I have gone on hunger strike [as of March 9, 2006]. Four years ago almost to the day, the British came to see me in Bagram and promised they would investigate my situation and I would be free in weeks. I co-operated with them fully.

Now, four years later, I am being tortured in Guantanamo. The Americans say I was in Afghanistan in July 2001 - when I was cooking eggs at the Westbury Hotel!

Enough is enough. I have the right to protest, peacefully. I am not harming them [the Americans]. I must be allowed to demonstrate peacefully. I do not want to die; I want to live, and I am not living here.

I hope to break the record for not eating the longest. I will not die, I will only strike until I can no longer stand under my own strength. But I will do it for 40, 50, 60, perhaps 70 days.

I am only five days with no food today. I forbid the US military from forced 'torture feeding' on me. I urge them to leave me alone until I can no longer stand. It is a matter of dignity. I know what their plan for me will be. They will try to torture-feed me. What they do is as follows: It began yesterday [March 8, 2006], when they started to punish me for striking. They forced me into the torture chair. The chair is black and looks a bit like an electric chair. There are straps all over and I was shackled.

The officer came in and read me the 'rules' saying I was guilty of inciting a hunger strike. 'You are being punished for this.' Then two soldiers held my neck while they cut my beard and shaved my head.

I am not told I will be in the Oscar Block for punishment. I am allowed a blanket from 10pm to 4.30am only. Otherwise I have only the clothes (orange, of course) I stand up in and an Isomat. It is freezing cold but when I asked a guard to turn the temperature up, he said: 'Don't come to Oscar'.

I have no soap and now only 30 sheets of TP [toilet paper] a day. They use degradation to try to break me. Yesterday I ran out of TP and asked for more. The soldier said: 'Don't come to Oscar.'

I have a yeast infection and yesterday the medical corpsman refused to give me my medication cream because I no longer had a piece of TP for him to put it on.

They still use the noise machines, too.

I know what is coming next. When the military broke some of the strikers, I was in Romeo and they brought four of them out, and I saw the horror in their eyes. They each had bruises on their noses.

They described what had happened. The tube the military used was hard and not as flexible as before. These were used for a kind of internal torture - they bruise and hurt your sensitive inner organs. Before, they left the tube in. Now, they take it in and out every meal.

They had been put in a chair, strapped much as I was yesterday, also with a head strap. Rather than two cans of Ensure [a food supplement], now it is five cans, plus three bottles of water in the bag. And they force it in over as little as 20 minutes.

All of this is done in Oscar, where I am now, in extreme cold. Sometimes there is a coil in your stomach, as they put too much of the tube in. Then a final bottle of water is used to flush the tube out. Then they give a pink medicine in the bag - some kind of laxative as dessert - and leave you in the chair for a minimum of two more hours, occasionally up to five. If the prisoner throws up, he gets the same treatment again but if you have been on strike for weeks, your stomach has shrunk.

As the prisoner sits, strapped in the torture chair, the guard takes the bag and tugs it out, sometimes humming to himself. The prisoner invariably screams, and there is blood on the tube. In response, the guard growls, 'Eat! Eat!' The prisoners invariably soil their pants. There is no change of pants - we must wash them ourselves. They use nappies, but to protect the chair only. When the prisoner vomits, the next time they use a gag on his mouth.

I spoke to the colonel about all this, and I said: 'Obviously, to do this you must have authority from higher up.' He replied: 'Yes, high, high up.'

With prisoners, the nose torture begins after 18 to 40 days. I expect they will torture-feed me after about 30 days - maybe April 3, 2006. They call this 'Chair Time'. That is when my real Chair Time will begin.

Inhuman, cruel, torture - all these words apply. Nobody, no matter how savage, has come up with torture-feeding before. I am a chef, and my profession has been to give pleasure through food. There is a sick irony that food is being used as torture against me now.

Will the US military, and the world, allow me to protest peacefully, or will I be subjected to torturefeeding? All I ask is for justice - this is a hunger strike to protect life, a struggle for the Truth.

AMERICANS CLEAR LONDON CHEF HELD AT GUANTANAMO

BY JASON LEWIS

249 words

8 April 2007

AN ALLEGED terrorist held at Guantanamo Bay has been cleared after evidence showed he was a chef at a London hotel when the CIA claimed he was training to be an Al Qaeda assassin.

US intelligence officials dubbed Ahmed Errachidi 'The General' and said he fought alongside Osama Bin Laden in the months before the September 11 attacks.

But an American military judge cleared Mr Errachidi after he examined the evidence, which was unearthed by The Mail on Sunday.

Despite the finding, his application to return home to Britain - where he had worked for nearly 20 years - has been refused and he remains a prisoner at the US military base. The Foreign Office will not help him because he is a British resident, not a citizen, and does not have a UK passport.

Mr Errachidi, a 39-year-old Moroccan, had worked in London restaurants for 18 years.

Employment records, obtained by this newspaper, showed that in July 2001 - when he was alleged to have been at the al-Farooq terrorist training camp in Afghanistan - he was working at the Westbury Hotel in Mayfair

Mr Errachidi has been held in Guantanamo Bay for five years, much of that time in solitary confinement.

Last night his lawyer, Clive Stafford Smith of human-rights group Reprieve, called on the British Government to allow his client home. He said: 'Despite the finding, Ahmed is still locked up in an isolation cell.'

Radical past. From the archives

2014-05-27T11:44:00.000+01:00

Frighteningly radical, set on violence what MI5 said about Labour boss's old comrades; Secret security service files reveal militant past of new General Secretary

By JASON LEWIS

First published 2 September 2001 The Mail on Sunday

THE NEW General Secretary of the Labour Party was named by the security services as a Communist firebrand and actively supported a series of student riots, The Mail on Sunday has learned.

Secret documents reveal how David Triesman now a respected trade union negotiator and a millionaire through inherited investment and property businesses was regarded as a leading figure in a 'potentially revolutionary movement' at the height of the Cold War.

The young activist advocated violence as a legitimate tactic for protesters, preached social upheaval and said there was no ideological difference between the Labour and Conservative

parties. Yet tomorrow, he will take up a key role in Tony Blair's New Labour, with special responsibility for the party's grassroots and conferences.

His domestic arrangements have also changed since his student days. Mr Triesman lives alone in a four-storey, Pounds 750,000 house bought ten years ago by a Liechtenstein trust run by a man who managed the secretive offshore investments of disgraced tycoon Robert Maxwell.

The radical past of David Maxim Triesman, now 57, is disclosed in security service reports which were prepared for the Cabinet and have been obtained by The Mail on Sunday.

They were commissioned in 1968, as students fought with the police outside the US Embassy in London and at university campuses across Britain.

The security services were asked to identify ringleaders and investigate whether the riots were 'organised, directed or financed' by 'international Communism'. Mr Triesman was identified as being part of a 'revolutionary element . . . associated with the Radical Student Alliance' (RSA).

He was one of the leaders of the RSA and helped lead protests against the Vietnam War and nuclear weapons. He also led demonstrations at Essex University, where he was a student.

The report says: 'Leading members of the RSA have been concerned in the organisation of most of the recent protest demonstrations at British universities, notably David Adelstein at the LSE and David Triesman at Essex.' During the height of the trouble, Mr Triesman said: 'We are going to demonstrate . . . we cannot preclude, sometimes, the possibility of violence.

'To say that one is opposed to violence is as absurd as to say that one is opposed to sleep.' The Government report quotes German revolutionaries as saying that the RSA were 'frighteningly radical, badly lacking in theory, but dead set on violence . . . the militants look for revolution as an aim in itself'.

The security services identified a number of links between the RSA and radical groups behind student riots across Europe. The report viewed the RSA as 'dangerous' and 'a serious Communist threat to the Government'.

The then head of the National Union of Students, Geoffrey Martin, later the most senior European Union official in Britain, claimed to have evidence that the protests were funded by a Communist group based in Prague. Mr Triesman called the charge 'scandalously misleading'.

As a radical student leader, David Triesman had no time for mainstream political parties. He wrote: 'In this country, we are faced with two immense, all-but-identical monoliths. They are different in name, but not in nature the Labour and the Conservative parties. Both come as attractively packaged as the admen can though the Labour Party, Mr Triesman said the trust was set up by his father. He added: 'I have lived there [in the house] for ten years and have at no time had any contact with Mr Frick.' Mr Triesman is involved in several companies started by his father, advertising manager and wartime aircraft inspector Michael, who died in 1991, and his mother Rita, who died in 1986.

These firms include an investment company, Maypar and Co, which generated more than Pounds 100,000 profits last year, and a property firm, Mortgage Credits Limited, which owns two factories in Finsbury Park, North London, where similar premises are being turned into luxury flats selling for a total of Pounds 4 million.

Yesterday, Mr Triesman said he had resigned as a director of the firms last month, but company records suggest he and his sister, theatre director Susan, still own the businesses.

After leaving university, Mr Triesman continued, for a time, as an outspoken radical. He was on the editorial board of a short-lived Leftwing newspaper, 7 Days, and worked at the Institute of Psychiatry's Addiction Research Unit as well as teaching Marxist sociology at London University.

It is as a trade union official that his views appear to have mellowed.

He became deputy general secretary of the National Association of Teachers in Further and Higher Education (NATFHE) in 1984, and general secretary of the Association of University Teachers in 1993.

Unexpectedly, considering his past, he earned a reputation as one of the most moderate of the modern union officials.

A surprise choice as General Secretary of the Labour Party, he was recruited by his close friend, party chairman Charles Clarke, and will arrive at Labour's Millbank headquarters with the task of helping the party get its finances in order after the expense of a second victorious election campaign.

His Labour Party biography says that he was a youth footballer for Tottenham Hotspur. However, the club's official archivist can find no trace of Mr Triesman in its records.

Last night, Mr Triesman said he was unaware of the existence of the Government files on him. He said: 'I have never seen any files and am not aware what they contain.'

Spies? Princess Margaret's butler and top author Derek Tangye.

2014-05-27T11:28:00.005+01:00

THE KGB'S SPY AT THE PALACE Soviet intelligence files reveal the extraordinary story of how Princess Margaret's butler and top author Derek Tangye sold secrets to Moscow

By JASON LEWIS and KIM WILLSHER

published 20 February 2000

Mail on Sunday

THE Soviet Union spied on the British Royal Family during the height of the Cold War and even succeeded in getting an agent employed as Princess Margaret's butler, The Mail on Sunday can reveal.

Today we unmask Thomas Cronin -code-name Rab -as the key agent in an audacious plan that led to the Royals' most intimate secrets being sent to spymasters in Russia.

Highly classified files in Moscow reveal how Cronin, who also served a five-year stint as butler to the American Ambassador, was just one of a number of Soviet spies given the mission of infiltrating London high society.

The archives name other agents, too, including bestselling author Derek Tangye and his wife Jean.

Spy? Author Derek Tangye

The revelation of their activities will astonish Establishment figures who remember the couple as one of the most glamorous of the London social set.

According to the records, the agents bugged the Queen's apartments in Buckingham Palace -as well as other Royal residences and some of the grandest private addresses in the capital. Maps of state rooms, privileged documents and society gossip were all chan-nelled back to Moscow.

The Soviets were particularly interested in intimate details of the private lives of the Royals, senior politicians and diplomats.

The aim was to use the information for blackmail purposes, or to leak it to subvert the British Establishment.

These sensational stories of political and sexual intrigue still reside in the Moscow files.

Operation Dom, which means

house in Russian, can be revealed today after our three months of investigations in London, Moscow and Washington gained unprecedented access to senior Soviet intelligence sources. Our reporters secretly met highly-decorated intelligence veterans in parks, hotels and a bathhouse.

The officials revealed how Dom was launched in the late Fifties before the Profumo Affair which saw the British War Minister caught in a 'honeytrap' with a prostitute linked to a Soviet agent.

At the time the operation was deemed so important that it involved the KGB and the rival GRU Soviet intelligence agencies working together -an almost unprecedented move.

At the centre of the plot was Cronin the butler. His codename, Rab, means slave in Russian.

From about 1955 until the early Sixties he sent a stream of enormously damaging material to his Moscow paymasters, first from inside the American Embassy in London and later from Kensington Palace.

A photograph taken in 1959 and published around the world reveals just how much access the spy enjoyed. Seated at a table in the sumptuous ballroom of Winfield House, then the US Embassy in London, are some of the most powerful men in the West.

On the left of the then US Ambassador, John Hay Whitney, is British Prime Minister Harold Macmillan, and on his right Winston Churchill and Field Marshal Montgomery.

Across the table sits President Eisenhower -and behind him is the embassy butler and Soviet spy, Thomas Cronin.

Standing ramrod straight, resplendent in starched collar, sharply creased trousers and immaculate top coat and tails, with a row of campaign medals proudly displayed across his chest, he seems every inch the perfect English butler.

It was the ideal cover. A senior GRU officer, who confirmed Cronin's identity to The Mail on Sunday, said: 'Rab was a highly valuable agent for the GRU.

'In the American Embassy he worked closely with the ambassador and other senior diplomats. He had access to documents, letters, including the ambassador's personal letters, and conversation and gossip.

Some of the most valuable material related to American/Western intentions in Germany, which in many ways was the big issue of the day dividing the USSR and USA.' He added that Rab was 'very difficult to handle'. At times he was 'scared' and at others 'confused'.

His mood swings were tolerated because of the level of information he supplied.

Yesterday a senior member of the US staff at the time said Cronin was very well known as a character within the embassy.

He said: 'Cronin was so pompous that he was a joke. Despite the fact that he was insufferable, many people saw him as a caricature from the Jeeves books and sort of liked him.' The revelations came as a total surprise, he said. But if Cronin was a spy, he would have been of immense value to the Soviets.

Cronin worked for Ambassador Whitney until 1960. When the American was due to be posted elsewhere, Cronin talked his way into a job at Kensington Palace to work for newlyweds Princess Margaret and Anthony Armstrong-Jones, now Lord Snowdon.

He lasted just 25 days at Kensing-ton Palace. In what was a minor scandal of the day he fell out with Armstrong-Jones and left the Royal household on the same day he was asked to sign the Official Secrets Act. The following year he sold a series of articles to national newspapers in which he claimed that he had quit because of the way the palace was run.

The final straw, he said, was when Anthony Armstrong-Jones complained he had entered a drawing room without knocking. On another occasion he snapped his fingers to attract the servant's attention.

It was never established whether Cronin's explanations were accurate.

Initial stories about the affair suggested he had been fired and it is even possible that he failed the vetting procedures that all palace staff have to go through.

Within weeks he moved to America, working first at a Florida country club and later at several homes in New York and Canada.

However, the GRU source claims Cronin continued to send information back to Moscow -much of it derived from his former colleagues at the American embassy and the Royal household.

But by early 1962 he had broken off all contact with the Russians. It is unclear exactly what happened but he seems to have lost faith in his GRU handler -an 'illegal', or Soviet

and Presiden t Nixon in London spy operating in London but not under official cover.

The GRU source revealed: 'There was some kind of misunderstanding between the two. Something went wrong with their relationship.

Rab effectively said to his controller: "You can't use me any more".' The vicious inquest that followed at the GRU headquarters in Moscow was an indication of the esteem in which Rab was held.

Vice Admiral Leonid Bek-renev, head of the GRU's 1st directorate which ran all so-called 'illegal' operations, was removed from his post in 1962 and 'demoted' to naval attach in Washington.

The then head of the GRU, Ivan Serov, was angry with Bekrenev over Rab's loss as an active source. He complained that basic mistakes were made and highlighted particularly the matter of Rab's somewhat flippant codename, which has a clear meaning in Russian and, in English, was a joke based on the name of the prominent Tory politician Rab Butler. Serov saw this as 'not serious and not safe'.

Cronin died in 1985 aged 70 having returned to Britain with his wife Lillian in the early Seventies to live in Northampton.

Lillian died last November and yesterday her son from an earlier marriage, Peter Groom, said he was amazed that his stepfather was named in the Soviet files, although he knew he had been a spy.

He said: 'He never really spoke about it. But once he did tell us that he worked for the British. He definitely said he had worked for British intelligence.

He worked at the American and Chinese embassies and kept the British security services informed. He said that, but nothing more.

'We are very loyal to Britain our family is British through and through.

He would not have been disloyal.' The view that Cronin also worked for the British is backed up by our GRU source who claimed he may have been a double agent, which would explain why he was often nervous and feared exposure.

The Soviet archive also details the activities of an agent codenamed Para.

Para, which means 'couple' in Russian, was not one spy but two: journalist and author Derek Tangye, later to write the best-selling autobiographical Minack Chronicles, and his wife Jean Nicol, who had been Press officer at the Savoy Hotel in London.

The Tangyes were a key source of information on the royals and both secretly worked for MI5 after the War until the early Fifties.

However, according to the Moscow files, they were also passing similar potentially highly damaging information to the Soviets.

With their prominence in society circles, connections with MI5 and their professional roles as journalist and public relations officer, their cover was also perfect.

Their access to intelligence on the Royals and other prominent high society names was unique and incredibly valuable in Operation Dom.

The Mail on Sunday has learned that Tangye and his wife were the source of royal letters, diaries and documents which found their way into the hands of the KGB and GRU.

Jean's job at the Savoy had given her incredible access to the countless famous and influential people passing through the hotel during the time she worked there. Perhaps significantly, she was involved in arranging meetings of the Friday Club, to which Prince Philip belonged before he married the Queen.

Details of these meetings and the antics of the Duke of Edinburgh's other bachelor friends at the Thursday Club, which met at Wheeler's Restaurant in Old Compton Street, Soho, found their way back to Moscow. But in 1949, to the total astonishment of friends and colleagues, including stars Danny Kaye, Noel Coward, Tyrone Power and Bing Crosby, the Tangyes suddenly abandoned their life as one of London's most glamorous couples and moved to a broken-down cottage in Cornwall.

The revelation that they were spying for the Soviets suggests they may have been living in fear of exposure and quit London before their treachery was discovered.

According to the secret Soviet file, they continued spying long after their self-imposed 'retirement', maintaining many valuable connections vital for Moscow but keeping out of the way of MI5 spycatchers.

Once in Cornwall the couple sent the Russians details of their influential guests. The files reveal insights into Labour deputy premier George Brown, who retreated to the couple's Cornish hideaway on several holidays.

Incredible as it may seem against this backdrop, one of Tangye's last acts at MI5 was to alert members of the most infamous Soviet spy ring that the game was up.

He once revealed that, as part of his job with the security service, 'I wrote a memo to Anthony Blunt warning him that Guy Burgess might be unreliable.' Soon after, Burgess fled Britain, defecting to Russia and sending the security services into turmoil.

Weeks later, Tangye and his wife left London.

Until now the Tangyes' secret treachery has remained hidden -not even guessed at by those closest to them. Derek Tangye died in October 1996. His wife had died ten years earlier.

It is only now that the damage done by Rab and Para can be assessed. None of those involved in Operation Dom has ever been brought to justice.

Perhaps the most significant aspect of the affair is that the file is still ranked with the most secret of the Cold War years. It could be that the newly 'open' Russia is just too embarrassed to allow this secret history to be exposed.

But it could also be that the Operation Dom file was never closed.

Perhaps today there are other butlers, writers and top hotel workers in the pay of modern day Russian 'illegals', waging a new war on the West in which information is still the key to power and influence.

Race to save Britain's oak trees

2013-07-09T09:46:00.003+01:00

Race to save Britain's oak trees from mystery disease that's 'bleeding them to death'... and the colourful beetle that could be to blame

Thousands of oaks have already been affected by a mysterious disease
It can kill the ancient trees within four years
Government has ordered a huge survey across Britain to track the threat

By JASON LEWIS

PUBLISHED: 22:10, 6 July 2013 | UPDATED: 22:32, 6 July 2013

Mail on Sunday

Under threat: A classical country scene with a large Oak in the Lake District National Park near Hawkshead

The Government is spending £1.1 million on an emergency project to save ancient English oaks from a mysterious disease that is causing the trees to ‘bleed to death’.

Thousands across the UK have already been infected, with the disease so serious that oaks are being felled and their bark stripped and burnt to prevent it spreading.

One theory is that a beetle may be responsible for the threat to the historic trees.

Researchers are now involved in a race against time to develop a way to stop the disease that, once it takes hold, kills the oaks within four years.

The Government has ordered a huge survey of trees across Britain to try to understand and track the new threat. Many of Britain’s ash trees are already doomed by the rapid spread of a fungal infection.

Scientists are also trying to isolate and identify a bacteria found on the dying oaks that was previously unknown and might be behind the infection.

The three-year project is an effort to stem the spread of so-called ‘acute oak decline’, or AOD, which is identified by dark weeping patches on stems of older trees. Oaks more than 50 years old are at the greatest threat.

Researchers believe the disease may be linked to the oak jewel beetle because the diseased trees’ bark is often pitted with the insects’ distinctive D-shaped exit holes.

The beetle’s larvae have also been found in or near the ‘bleeding’ patches on the trunk of dying trees. It is not known if beetles are attracted to the scent of the infected trees or if they are carriers of the disease that is killing them.

Attack: The oak jewel beetle that feeds on oak timber

Using advanced sequencing technology, scientists will analyse the DNA of bacteria, fungus and insects found on healthy and infected trees to isolate the cause.

The Forestry Commission and bioscience experts at Bangor and Cambridge Universities are leading the project, which will take samples from up to 200 woodlands.

Estates belonging to the National Trust are among the hardest hit. At Blickling Hall in Norfolk, the majority of the oaks within its 950 acres of historic parkland are suffering from the disease. Ancient trees at Attingham Park in Shropshire are also affected.

According to a Forestry Commission document, estate workers should ‘strip the outer bark and sapwood of heavily infected and dying or dead trees after felling and burn on site’.

‘Rapid destruction of stripped bark is recommended to prevent the possibility the disease spreading,’ it adds.

Mysterious disease: Thousands of oaks have already been affected, which kills them within four years

Dr James McDonald, from Bangor University, is carrying out DNA research using forensic science techniques pioneered in medical research to try to identify the bacteria.

He said: ‘It is affecting older trees, some hundreds of years old, and whatever is behind it is causing the decline of something that has been here for so long, is much loved, and is difficult, if not impossible, to replace.

‘It is a very complicated issue. It could involve new bacteria that have been isolated from the lesions on the stems or the oak jewel beetle. We are looking at their involvement but both could be passive bystanders in the process. We don’t know.’

Dr John Morgan, head of the Forestry Commission’s Plant Health Service, said: ‘We are determined to do everything possible to protect our trees. AOD is a complex condition and this new funding will enable us to better understand it, and the number and distribution of trees affected.’

The Archbishop of Canterbury attacks payday loan industry

2013-06-21T08:26:00.001+01:00

The Archbishop of Canterbury attacks payday loan industry

June 20th, 2013 | by Jason Lewis | Published by Bureau of Investigative Journalism

Archbishop: Ban "usury" lenders from our high streets

The Archbishop of Canterbury has called for the Government to ban ‘legal usury on our high streets’ in a strongly worded attack on the payday loan industry.

Speaking in a parliamentary debate on the high-cost loan companies, some charging customers more than 4,000%, the Archbishop said the Government should introduce a cap on the rates the firms can charge.

He also dismissed Government claims that a cap would restrict competition and force people to turn to loan sharks.

‘The payday lending industry has grown at a vast speed’ he said, and was now ‘a situation too big to ignore’.

The debate follows a Bureau investigation that revealed the huge growth in the industry over the past three years. The research showed that the 12 biggest high-cost lending companies made almost £1bn in revenues in the last year, with some tripling their turnover.

The Archbishop told the House of Lords payday lenders assured people with ‘impressively slick marketing campaigns and targeted advertisements that the process of taking out a loan is quick, simple and safe.

‘But once you have taken out the loan it is difficult to get out of the cycle, with the rates offered, simply paying off the interest becomes a struggle.’

Calling for a cap on the lenders interest rates, he said: ‘A cap doesn’t mean 25% or 30%.

‘Caps are needed at a sensible level that does not choke off supply and send people into the hands of loans sharks. But on the other hand caps are there to prevent usurious lending.’

Legal usury
Responding to arguments that caps should not be brought in ‘at any price’, he added: ‘The trouble is they are at any price, typically over 2,500% on an annual basis. We do need to look at reasonable limits that cut out legal usury from our high streets.’

Former media boss Lord Hollick, the Labour peer, accused the major high street banks, including taxpayer-owned Royal Bank of Scotland, of funding the payday lending industry instead of providing more reasonable loans to consumers.

And he pointed to the increasing ownership of payday firms by US businesses despite restrictions of high cost loans in the US and of the involvement of Conservative donor Henry Angest with high cost lender Everyday Loans.

Citing the Bureau’s report he pointed to high increases in turnover and profits experienced by some high-cost lenders.

He added: ‘Harsh economic circumstances may be the driver of demand, but the secret of the high profit is the mix of simple and instant loan availability, lax regulation, the absence of competition and, of course, eye watering interest rates.’

He added: ’The lenders business model is to recruit borrowers and then to increase the number of loans, thereby maximising the yield per customer, and so begins the awful debt cycle which traps the many payday borrowers.

‘For the lenders the high debt experience, estimated at more than 25%, is more than compensated for by the stratospheric interest rates.’

A U-turn
Shadow Business Minister Lord Mitchell accused the Government of a U-turn on earlier plans to clamp down on payday lenders and cap the interest rates they are allowed to charge.

He said the ‘government’s heart had gone out of the matter and they were retracting their position.

‘The government no longer seems to care,’ he added.

He demanded that the Government ‘state unequivocally that usury rates are morally wrong and should be made illegal.’

But Business Minister Viscount Younger, responding for the Government, ruled out any immediate cap on the interest rates of payday lenders.

He said consumers had to take personal responsibility for their own finances. ‘Payday loans are a new phenomena, they should only be used for a short-term fix and never for long-term debt problems. A way for managing a short-term cash flow problem,’ he said.

He added: ‘Spiralling cost of credit is not the main crux of the problem. Problems arise when people take out this kind of short-term, high-cost loan when it is not suitable for them. When they cannot afford to repay.’

He said that lenders did not always carry out adequate assessments of potential borrowers ability to afford the loan.

And that, in this respect, ‘the payday market is not functioning in the interests of consumers.’

He added: ‘The government is therefore deeply concerned about the scale of consumer detriment identified, the speed and ease at which loans can be accessed, the frequency with which loans are rolled over and the grave financial and social problems arising from defaults and the calling-in of such repayments.’

He said the Government and regulators were taking tough enforcement action against unscrupulous lenders. And that the new regulator, the Financial Conduct Authority, which begins work in April next year, would have tough new powers ‘including imposing unlimited fines on firms and… a more stringent bar for market entry’.

Revealed: The £1 billion high cost lending industry

2013-06-13T16:43:00.004+01:00

Revealed: The £1 billion high cost lending industry

June 13th, 2013 | by Jason Lewis Bureau of Investigative Journalism

Bundles of cash are being lent to consumers with poor credit ratings. (Image via Sutterstock.com)

Britain’s top dozen high cost lenders – some charging interest rates of more than 4,000% – made almost £1bn in the last 12 months, the Bureau of Investigative Journalism can reveal.

The figure is more than four times greater than the turnover of the entire industry assessed just three years ago.

Half of the biggest high-risk loan companies in the Bureau’s research also posted profit margins of more than 30%.

This massive growth in an industry that is largely made up of controversial payday loan companies, has taken place despite Britain suffering a double-dip recession, and against the background of falling wages and a squeeze on more mainstream borrowing.

The Bureau’s investigation into these lenders analysed the accounts of companies that offer debt to customers with low credit ratings, and charge high interest rates in the process.

Many of the companies in the research offer payday loans, a term used to refer to a short-term, high-cost loan, regardless of whether the payment is linked to a borrower’s payday. Some of these companies charge interest that is equivalent to 4,000% annually, on loans intended to last a few weeks or months. Other companies provide loans, some more long-term, with interest rates above 50%, considerably higher than conventional mortgages, overdraft facilities and even credit card companies.

Competition Commission
The disclosures come as the Office of Fair Trading (OFT) is due to decide whether it will refer the payday loans industry to the Competition Commission for a market investigation into alleged restrictive business practices.

The OFT is also waiting for responses to a series of letters sent to the leading firms questioning how they are run.

The government watchdog’s review of the industry has already led to three companies having their licenses to issue loans revoked and another three placed under formal investigation.

Earlier this year prime minister David Cameron rejected calls for a cap on the interest rates the firms can charge borrowers. He told the House of Commons: ‘The most important thing to do… is to welcome what the Office of Fair Trading is doing, which is putting those companies on notice… without an effective regulated sector, there are far more dangers from loan sharks.’

Now research by the Bureau shows how the payday loans firms and other high-risk lenders, have enjoyed a period of rapid expansion funded by loans from high street banks and huge investment from foreign firms, mostly in the US where, unlike in Britain, payday loans are heavily regulated.

The Bureau’s analysis of the industry’ top 50 firms reveals that:

• Leading firms are boasting profit margins over 30%.

• At least seven leading firms saw their revenues treble in the last year.

• Six firms made operating profits of more than £10m.

• One loan company director earned a salary of £1.6m and four more were paid between £200,000 and £800,000 a year.

• Shareholders in one firm received a £5.3m dividend.

• Small loan company bosses are becoming overnight millionaires, in one case transforming a former guesthouse owner into a gentleman farmer.

The total turnover of the firms we examined was £1.4bn compared to £242m in 2009, when the industry was analysed in detail by the government agency the National Consumer Council.

Leading company Wonga.com posted profits of more than £63m while three others made more than £30m operating profits: Instant Cash Loans, MEM Consumer Finance ltd and Amigo Loans.

Recommendation after recommendation and review after review has uncovered a systematic failing in this industry, which continues to claim it can sort itself out.
Stella Creasy MP

Seven companies more than tripled their revenue in the past year: Wonga.com, Lending Stream, TxtLoan, CFO Lending, The Loan Store, First and Goal Ltd and SDM Corporation.

And six companies in the top ten made pre-tax profits of more than £10m and profit margins based on their operating profits of more than 30%. These include WageDayAdvance, which was bought by a US-based company in February and made £16.4m pretax profits on £34m turnover.

Systematic failings
Labour MP Stella Creasy, who has campaigned to limit the interest that firms can charge, said: ’Recommendation after recommendation and review after review has uncovered a systematic failing in this industry, which continues to claim it can sort itself out.

‘Those struggling with the debts they are causing know otherwise – they desperately need the government to do the right thing and cap the total cost of credit that can be charged in the UK to give British consumers the protection that they deserve from these problems – and that others around the world enjoy.’

The huge expansion in the industry is demonstrated by the growth of medium-sized firm CFO Lending, which published its accounts at Companies House this week.

The firm, which charges 4,414% APR interest on loans and is run by Essex property developer James Keeble, has seen its turnover increase from £790,000 in 2009 to £19.6m for the year ending August 2012 – a 24-fold increase.

Other foreign-owned firms posted huge increases in turnover but made losses after paying fees due to their parent company.

One of the biggest firms in the market, Lending Stream, had an income of almost £33m, up from £10m a year earlier, but made a loss of £3.6m after paying more than £36m in administrative expenses.

According to its accounts, its only employees are two foreign-based directors, but it faced huge costs, including paying £5.3m in royalties to its US parent Global Analytics Inc, based in California.

Payday loans have come under heavy attack by consumer groups including the Citizens Advice Bureau. Such groups draw on research into the industry showing the difficulty many people have repaying their loans.

Research by R3, the insolvency practitioner, shows that more than 5m adults were considering taking out a payday loan in the first six months of this year. It also revealed that millions of people – 13% of the population – prioritised paying back the loans over buying food, clothes or paying their heating bills.

Consumer research group, Which? also revealed that a third of payday loans were simply taken out to pay off another payday loan.

Well rewarded
The growth in the industry has rewarded investors and directors well. Many of the chief executives of the companies analysed by the Bureau are earning six-figure salaries. The highest paid director at Wonga.com earned £1.6m in 2010, according to company accounts.

Dale Chapman and his father, founders of Wage Day Advance, received a share of a dividend of £5.3m according to a note in the accounts, as well as a pay-out after selling the company to US-owned Speedy Cash Holdings in February. Mr Chapman’s father, Paul bought a farm in Harrogate, west Yorkshire in the run-up to the sale.

High Cost Loans: The money pouring into a boom for consumer loans

2013-06-13T16:40:00.004+01:00

The money pouring into a boom for consumer loans

June 13th, 2013 | by Jason Lewis Bureau of Investigative Journalism

High street banks have lent to payday loan companies. (Image: Barclays bank via Sutterstock.com)

The rapid growth of the high-cost consumer credit industry has attracted considerable investment despite criticism of the huge interest rates charged by many companies.

The Bureau’s investigation into the sector, which includes many payday loan companies, reveals that Britain’s high street banks have put millions of pounds into the industry. US companies, some banned by law from issuing payday loans in the American states where they are based, are also investing in the UK’s less regulated market. Many have bought up UK companies, paying the UK founders millions of pounds for their shareholdings.

Criticism of the industry has focused on the level of interest charged, with some loans costing up to 4,474% in interest. The government has rejected calls to cap the interest rates the firms can charge, claiming it would force people to turn to illegal loan sharks.

Tory donor: Henry Angest

Instead the Office of Fair Trading (OFT) is attempting to crack down on the industry, threatening to remove firms’ licences if they fail to check whether customers can afford the loans or use aggressive debt collection tactics. The OFT has already removed three licences.

Buying in
Despite this new attempt at regulation, international businessmen including some from eastern Europe, a South African mining company president and US venture capitalist Don Valentine – who made his name funding Apple, Google and YouTube – have bought into the industry.

Many of the companies in the Bureau’s research offer payday loans, a term referring to a short-term, high-cost loan, regardless of whether the payment is linked to a borrower’s payday. These companies charge over 4,000% interest rates. Other companies provide loans, some more long-term, with interest rates above 50% – considerably higher than conventional mortgages, overdraft facilities and even credit cards.

Among those who have invested is the Arbuthnot Bank Group run by chief executive Henry Angest, a Swiss-born millionaire, and a major Conservative Party donor.

Angest now controls Everyday Loans Limited, which offers the ‘financial freedom’ of unsecured loans of between £500 and £10,000 at 74.8%. This is not a short term payday loan company, but has rates of interest higher than other more traditional consumer loans such as credit cards.

US companies, some banned by law from issuing payday loans in the American States where they are based, are also investing in the UK’s less regulated market.

A former Conservative party treasurer, Angest has contributed £7m to the party in loans and donations.

Last year Everyday Loans was purchased by an Arbuthnot group subsidiary, Secure Trust Bank, which is investing millions of pounds to fund new lending.

Arbuthnot Latham, a private bank, in which Angest owns a majority stake, and which is also part of the Arbuthnot group, has offered a £5m loan to the Conservative Party at 3.5% interest. The loan is listed on the official Electoral Commission register but a Conservative Party spokesman described it as a ‘credit facility’ which the Party had not drawn upon.

A spokesman for Everyday Loans claimed the company was a responsible lender. He said the firm does not provide ‘payday loans’ nor is it a ‘short-term lender’.

He said customers had to borrow over a minimum of 13 months and added: ‘Everyday Loans provides loans to customers who are underserved by the high street banks. If Everyday Loans did not provide this service those looking for loans would have to approach payday loan companies, pawnbrokers or home collected credit companies where interest rates would be very much higher.’

He said: ‘We are not engaged or plan to engage in payday lending. The interest rate charged on [our] loans reflects the risks involved in lending to the individual borrowers. The rates we charge are typically 3 times less than the representative rates of lenders like the home collected credit companies and 20 times less than payday lenders.’

Asked whether the firm or its chairman and chief executive Henry Angest had discussed the company’s business with the prime minster or the government, the spokesman added: ‘We can confirm that we have not discussed the business of Everyday Loans Limited with either the Conservative Party, the current Government or Civil Servants.’

Angest is the second leading Conservative donor with a connection to a high-risk lending company. Adrian Beecroft runs Dawn Capital Investments, a private investors fund, which has a major stake in Wonga, one of Britain’s best-known and fastest growing payday lenders.

Beecroft, who is also a government adviser, has given almost £800,000 to the Conservatives since 2006, most recently contributing more than £100,000 last December. Wonga’s turnover has trebled to almost £185m the last year.

Research by the Bureau also shows that these high-cost lending companies are often heavily reliant on the leading high street banks for funding and set up costs.

Despite widespread criticism that the major banks are reluctant to lend to small businesses and entrepreneurs planning start-ups, payday lenders have found them willing partners.

One major payday firm, US-based Lending Stream, describes Barclays Bank, which currently lends to businesses at 5.1% APR, as a major ‘strategic partner’.

3,378% interest rate
The firm, owned by Delaware-registered Global Analytics Holdings Inc, had a £32.7m turnover in 2011 with 142,000 British customers borrowing £31.2m. Its customers pay 3,378% APR to borrow from it.

The firm’s Californian-based boss Krishna Gopinathan claims he founded the firm to ‘give back’ and to ‘empower’ people with low access to credit.

How much Barclays lends the firm is not disclosed, but it has a fixed charge over the company’s deposits providing, according to Lending Stream, ‘integrated banking solutions … lending, risk management, trade, cash and liquidity management, and specialist asset and sales financing’.

Barclays, which at one stage sought a taxpayer-funded government bail out before instead reaching a deal with Middle East investors, is also involved with several other high-cost lenders.

Barclays Capital, its investment arm, lent £75m to Everyday Loans Limited according to its filings to Companies House to provide ‘funding for the provision of consumer finance lending to customers’, until this was paid off when the firm was bought out last year.

According to documents filed at Companies House the bank also has a charge over credit balances facility for TxTLoan Limited, a firm offering 4,474% interest loans through mobile text messaging.

Barclays was keen to stress that it no longer lends to payday loan companies. A spokeswoman for Barclays Bank said: ‘We do not lend to any of these companies.’

Other major banks are also involved in funding the industry. HSBC provided seed capital for Money in Advance Limited, a firm registered in the British Virgin Islands, the offshore tax haven, which explains, for example, that it will loan customers £250 for 22 days and collect £305 – an interest rate of 3,697% APR.

Taxpayer-owned Royal Bank of Scotland (RBS), which was bailed out after the financial collapse in 2008 with £45bn from the government, is another that has invested in the high-cost credit sector.

RBS funds Amigo Loans Limited, owned by entrepreneur James Benamor, who is paid £890,000 a year. His firm, which says it has now stopped doing payday loans, was, until recently lending at 199% APR. The Bureau has included the company in its data as the financial records cover the period when it was still operating as a payday lender.

Before the bail out the bank, though subsidiary NatWest, helped Nottingham city jeweller Henry Hallam build up his Money Shop business before he sold out to US-giant Dollar Finance in a deal in 1999.

Its website advertised: ‘Borrow £400 for 31 days, pay £400 interest’.

Taxpayer-owned Royal Bank of Scotland, which was bailed out after the financial collapse in 2008 with £45bn from the government, is another that has invested heavily in the payday business.

At the end of last year it replaced these with new longer term ‘guarantor loans… Based on how much your friends trust you, NOT your credit score’, it says. These loans charge 49.9% APR in interest.

Lloyds TSB, which took £5.5bn from the taxpayer to save it from collapse, is another high-street name involved in funding the payday market.

The bank helped fund Instant Cash Loans Limited, owners of the Money Shop.

Investment in the industry is flowing in from the US too. The Bureau’s research highlights the growing involvement of US firms in the British payday industry at a time when such companies are facing tighter regulation of their activities at home.

Rapid growth
Dollar Finance has overseen the massive growth of the Money Shop taking it from a company with 34 staff and a turnover of £2.9m in 1998 to one with 2,300 staff and an income of £172.3m today.

The success of its Money Shop stores has made Dollar Finance, which is owned by Philadelphia-based DFC Global Corporation, keen to expand.

In 2009 it acquired Express Finance (Bromley) from Michael Thorpe, who, before the buy out, had employed his 25-year-old son and his wife to help run the business, for almost £5m. In the three years after the takeover the company’s revenues increased tenfold to £51.7m and it is making profits of almost £17m a year.

In April 2011 Dollar Finance expanded further, buying internet loans business MEM Consumer Finance, which trades as PaydayUK and issued £30m worth of loans last year.

Expansion of the payday loans industry in the US has been curtailed by a growing clampdown on high interest rates by state governments. Some states have even banned payday loans.

In 13 states the loans are either illegal or, while not explicitly banned, prohibited by strict usury limits – hard interest rate caps on the annual percentage rate.

Since 2007 a federal law has also capped lending to military personnel at a maximum of 36%.

Dollar Finance is based in Pennsylvania, where state laws cap interest rates on short term loans at 30% compared to the 2,949% APR offered on its PayDayUK website this week.

In 13 states the loans are either illegal or, while not explicitly banned, prohibited by strict usury limits – hard interest rate caps on the annual percentage rate.

Cash Choice UK Limited is another firm owned in a US state where its interest rates, advertised on its website as 3,491% APR, would be outlawed.

The firm is owned by US citizen David Vickers, president of Cash Choice Inc, based in Atlanta, Georgia, where payday loans have been banned for more than 100 years.

A statement on the Georgia governor’s website says: ‘Payday loans have become a multibillion dollar industry in recent years. Nevertheless, it is illegal in Georgia to make a payday loan.

‘(The) law authorizes felony and racketeering charges against violators, as well as fines of up to $25,000 per violation and a possible jail sentence of 25 years.’

The risks of similar legislation in Britain is reflected in the annual report of Texas-based Cash America International Inc, owners of one of the biggest UK payday lending firms. CashEuroNetUK, which trades as QuickQuid and Pounds To Pocket, and advertises interest rates of 1,734% APR.

In Texas the state senate has been pushing for new laws that would put limits on payday and short-term loan firms charging interest rates of 1,000%.

The latest proposal would limit customers to one payday loan at a time. The size of the loans would also be limited by their monthly income and the loan could only be renewed four times.

With the UK operation generating revenues of £198m, Cash America warned its shareholders: ‘If prescriptive regulations are adopted (in the UK) the Company’s compliance costs will be significantly increased’.

RBS and Lloyds did not respond to the Bureau’s questions.

High Cost Loans. Making money: Profiting from high-interest loans

2013-06-13T16:36:00.000+01:00

Making money: Profiting from high-interest loans

June 13th, 2013 | by Jason Lewis Bureau of Investigative Journalism

Offering a solution: High interest loan companies. (Image via Shutterstock.com)

CashEuroNet UK LLC

Trading as Pounds to Pocket and QuickQuid, the US-based firm is one of the biggest players in the UK payday loans market. It began trading in 2007.

It is registered in Delaware, the tiny state known as the ‘brass plate capital’, where US firms can take advantage of low taxes and laws protecting shareholders.

In the UK its only presence are two addresses registered with the Office of Fair Trading (OFT) belonging to a City of London lawyer and secretarial service firm in Green Lanes, north London.

The firm has announced it is closing its UK branch and instead will trade from the US. It is owned by Cash America Net Holdings, based in Chicago.

Founded in Irving, Texas in 1983, starting with a single pawnshop, the chain grew through rapid acquisitions and was listed on the New York Stock Exchange in 1990.

The company’s annual report for 2012 show its UK operations now generate turnover of £198m of its £1.2bn annual revenue.

The report describes the firm’s ‘core purpose’ as providing ‘financial solutions that help ordinary people meet their needs and pursue their dreams’.

It says it offers ‘reliable assistance when, often, our customers have nowhere else to turn.’

Advertising on television in the UK, Pounds to Pocket charges interest of 278% APR. On its website it says: ‘Borrow £500 and pay £79.09 per month for 12 months at a fixed interest rate of 140% per year. The total charge for credit is £449.01 (all interest). The Total Repayable is £949.01.’

In his report to shareholders in April the firm’s president wrote: ‘The recent review of the payday lending industry in the UK by Britain’s Office of Fair Trading have captured most of the headlines and analysts’ attention in 2012. The most frustrating part of the process is the uncertainties it creates…

‘I wish I could provide you with granular clarity on how these federal agencies might impact our business, but to do so would only be speculation at this point…

‘Fortunately, many legislators today take heed of the growing library of independent research documenting the lack of credit in the underbanked community and the dangers associated with restricting product design via legislation.’

Wonga.com

Israeli businessman Errol Damelin and South African Jonty Hurwitz set up the firm in 2007.

Hurwitz is an expert in ‘control theory’ and helped design a mathematical model to allow the firm to issue the maximum number of loans in the shortest time possible at the minimum risk.

Wonga sees itself as a technology company rather than a finance firm, with Damelin’s ambition for it to be ‘world class…like Facebook, Amazon and Apple’.

It quickly went from issuing £3.2m worth of loans in 2008 to issuing £246m loans last year, adverting interest rates of 4,214% APR.

In 2010 an unnamed director earned £1.6m.

Instant Cash Loans Ltd, MEM and Express Finance Bromley (owned by Dollar Finance)

Nottingham jeweller Henry Hallam set up Instant Cash Loans, which trades as the Money Shop, with one shop in the city centre in 1992.

By the time he sold up to US loans giant Dollar Finance in 1999 he had opened branches in Bristol, Newcastle, Sheffield, Coventry, Cardiff, Birmingham, Sunderland, Hull, Southampton and Bolton.

At the time Hallam said: ‘By buying us they have established a bridgehead in the UK.’

That ‘bridgehead’ has seen the firm expand rapidly, going from 34 employees in 1998 to 2,339 in 2012.The company is now generating revenue of £172.3m a year and profits of £34.4m. It offers cheque cashing, pawnbroking and foreign currency as well as loans.

Dollar Finance also owns MEM Consumer Finance, which trades as PaydayUK and offers online short-term loans at 2,949.1% APR.

Started by Oxfordshire businessman Iain McKenzie in August 2003, its first year saw a turnover of just £110,181 and an operating loss of £47,867. Its four staff earned £71,226 between them.

Backed by loans from the Bank of Scotland and Barclays to cover further lending, the firm rapidly expanded. By 2010, in the run-up the sale to Dollar Finance, turnover was up to £60m, and it employed 232 staff.

Dollar Finance has continued to expand the company’s operations and it now employs 285 staff and had a turnover of more than £123m last year.

It is currently advertising a £275 loan over 28 days. The total amount repayable is £357.36 – an interest rate of 2,949.1% APR.

Express Finance Bromley was set up in 2000 by Michael Thorpe, aged 65, from Bromley, with a loan from Barclays Bank. Thorpe sold his his stake in the firm to Dollar in 2009 and the US firm began a rapid expansion.

Daryl Thorpe remained a director of the firm until last year. He is now running a new payday firm, Money in Advance, which has South African mining company president Greg Kinross as a director.

Amigo Loans (previously Financial Processing UK Ltd)

Owned by entrepreneur James Benamor, who started his loan brokerage company, the Richmond Group, in 1999 at the age of 21.

Unable to afford advertising at the time, he says he printed leaflets and hand-delivered 30,000 in the first month.

His firm says it has abandoned ‘payday loans’, which it previously issued at 199% APR charging £400 interest on a month long loan of £400.

At the end of last year it replaced these with new longer-term ‘guarantor loans’. These are ‘based on how much your friends trust you, NOT your credit score’, it said.

Amigo Loans, advertised on daytime television by men in sombreros, now only lends for a minimum of a year. It says: ‘Borrowing £5,000 over 60 months, repaying £197.62 per month, total repayable £11,857.20.’ That is £6,857.20 in interest over the five-year loan.

Last year the firm had a £50m turnover.

Wage Day Advance Limited

After leaving school in 1989, Dale Chapman started as an apprentice fitter at a local bus company, but quickly realised working for someone else was not for him.

He opened a shop selling secondhand furniture and progressed to becoming one of the UK’s youngest pawnbrokers before starting his loans firm in 2001.

Now 32, he sold the firm to US loan company Speedy Cash Holdings in February.

Claiming to be one of the UK’s fastest growing payday lenders, its website says: ‘Make any day your Payday’ and reveals that borrowing £225 for 28 days would cost £66.38 in interest, the equivalent of 2,814.2% APR.

It claims it is now processing over 800,000 loan applications a month.

Although the purchase price has not been revealed, company disclosures in New York showed the American buyers raised $100m (£64m) to fund the acquisition and future loans to customers.

In the run up to the sale, Chapman and his wife Kim bought a property in Harrogate, paying £1.75m in cash according to planning records.

They appear to have immediately upset their new neighbours with plans for a car port and garage which were said to be a ‘over development’ of ‘listed’ buildings. A second application to convert a barn and connect it to the house was rejected and plans to extend the access road to the house drew concern from the local Ramblers and Bridleways Associations.

At the same time, Chapman’s father Paul, 63, another shareholder, bought a farm in Harrogate for £2.15 million, according to Land Registry documents. He moved in after selling the family home in Keithley, West Yorkshire, which had been run as guesthouse.

High Cost Loans: The high cost lending companies

2013-06-13T16:32:00.001+01:00

Get the data: The high cost lending companies

June 13th, 2013 | by Jason Lewis | Published by Bureau of Investigative Journalism.

The growing consumer credit industry. (Image: Balance sheet via Shutterstock.com)

The Bureau of Investigative Journalism has examined the financial health of the top 50 high cost lending companies to reveal an industry with revenues over £1bn a year.

The data reveals that the top 12 companies, many of them charging interest rates over 4,000%, have a combined turnover of nearly £1bn and that seven of the companies where accounts are available have tripled their revenues in the past 12 months.

The Bureau analysed the accounts of the top companies operating in this fast growing sector where these were available. Most companies in the top 20 file full accounts at Companies House. Many of the smaller companies only report limited financial detail. In these cases we have used turnover estimates compiled by Duedil, which provides a financial analysis service, in order to rank the companies.

The list of the 50 companies used was compiled after consultation with industry experts.

Many of the companies in the research offer payday loans, a term used to refer to a short term, high cost loan, regardless of whether the payment is linked to a borrower’s pay day. Others include short term and high-risk lenders that charge high rates of interest.

Click here to download the data on the consumer credit industry.

Plebgate: PROBE COP RAPPED OVER FREEBIES

2013-06-11T22:08:00.003+01:00

PLEBGATE PROBECOP RAP OVER FREEBIES;

VIP treatment at gigs and match

EXCLUSIVE

Jason Lewis

9 June 2013

RESIGNED: Andrew Mitchell

THE senior police officer leading the review into the Plebgate affair has been warned over freebies he enjoyed at the home of a Premier League club.

Deputy chief constable Ian Hopkins was questioned over hospitality he accepted from Manchester City FC's security chief at least four times - which he failed to declare promptly.

He enjoyed VIP facilities at sell-out concerts at the City of Manchester Stadium to see Take That, Coldplay and Bruce Springsteen and to watch a Champions League fixture against Real Madrid.

Mr Hopkins and guests were treated to a hotpot and drinks in the corporate hospitality area.

He is in charge of a team of officers from the Greater Manchester force examining the Met police's handing of Plebgate, the affair which led Tory MP Andrew Mitchell to resign as Chief Whip, after a row with officers in Downing Street.

Deputy Chief: Ian Hopkins

The newly appointed £140,000-a-year deputy chief is investigating claims officers lied and fabricated evidence. Mr Mitchell was accused of calling the police plebs, which he denies.

Mr Hopkins has frequently overseen the policing of football matches. Now he has been warned about his failure to disclose immediately special treatment as a guest of the stadium's head of security Peter Fletcher, who is also a former senior police officer with the Greater Manchester force.

Last night a statement from the chief constable Sir Peter Fahy said: "The Deputy Chief Constable has attended three concerts at the Etihad having purchased standard tickets. At each he has received an element of hospitality and has been given advice by the Chief Constable about this issue. As a result he has made additional entries in the force's Gifts and Hospitality Register.”

He added that Mr Hopkins had not been formally disciplined but said the discussion had been “part of the normal relationship between managers and staff and provides a record that a matter has been addressed.”

He added: "It is accepted that occasionally police officers are offered gifts and hospitality due to the role that they perform and the relationships that they build with partners and commercial organisations. It is important that any such gifts and hospitality that are accepted are properly recorded.

"There is a commercial relationship between MCFC and Greater Manchester Police over the provision of policing services. The charging mechanism for this this set by national guidance, which GMP adheres to."

Clegg: Belgians spring tax surprise on Mrs Clegg

2013-04-29T09:26:00.001+01:00

Belgians spring tax surprise on Mrs Clegg

Jason Lewis and Bojan Pancevski Published: Sunday Times 28 April 2013

Nick Clegg and his wife, Miriam Gonzalez (James Glossop)

BELGIAN bureaucrats have left Nick Clegg and his wife baffled over claims that she failed to pay tax for domestic staff the couple employed at their former home in Brussels.

Miriam Gonzalez, the Spanish-born wife of the deputy prime minister, was ordered in absentia to pay €1,000 — £840 at today’s exchange rate — after being taken to court over unpaid social security contributions for “up to four domestic staff”. The Labour Court in Brussels issued two judgments against her, one in December 2006 and another in May 2007.

However, the couple — who had lived in the city while he was an MEP and she worked for the European Commission — had moved to London in 2005.

The Liberal Democrats last night blamed “an administrative error” by the Belgian authorities and said that Gonzalez, an international lawyer, was attempting to establish “the full facts”.

“Miriam has attempted to establish why she was never notified about either the tribunal proceedings or the judgments, which both happened long after she had left Belgium to live in the UK,” said her spokesman.

A lawyer who represented the tax authorities in one of the hearings against Gonzalez said she deals with hundreds of similar cases each year. “Disputes like this are common in Belgium,” she said.

Gonzalez’s spokesman said that the National Social Security Office, the Belgian equivalent of the Department for Work and Pensions, had confirmed in writing to her last week that she did not owe it any money. All the same, she would repay anything she owed “if that were ever to be the case”.

“The first time that either Miriam or Nick were aware of these judgments was when they were brought to their attention by The Sunday Times,” the spokesman added.

“Miriam was never notified of the proceedings or the judgments and was therefore not represented and the facts were never challenged or checked. The validity of the judgments must be considered in that regard.”

Court documents reveal that the authorities in Belgium brought two cases against Gonzalez for defaulting on taxes.

The writs alleged failure to make payments for staff employed at the couple’s 19th-century townhouse in the heart of one of Brussels’s most prestigious districts.

Gonzalez was working as a senior adviser to the EU commissioners Chris Patten — the former Conservative cabinet minister and now BBC chairman — and Benita Ferrero-Waldner of Austria.

According to documents seen by The Sunday Times, she registered her household as “employers of domestic personnel” with the Belgian equivalent of Companies House between 2003 and 2005. She was found in default of tax for her employees in 2006 and 2007 after she had left Brussels.

Belgium judgment: Miriam Clegg's name was removed from the copy due to privacy laws

Kazakhstan

2013-04-21T09:01:00.001+01:00

Blair aide reopens bitter feud with axed 'mad cow' mandarin - in speech to Kazakh dictator's cronies

Jonathan Powell gave speech in oil rich former Soviet state Kazakhstan
But he launched personal attack on Sir Richard Packer
He previously compared Blair’s government to Hitler’s Third Reich

PUBLISHED: Mail on Sunday 23:17, 20 April 2013 | UPDATED: 23:17, 20 April 2013

Tony Blair’s former chief of staff flew 3,000 miles to an oil-rich former Soviet state run by a brutal dictator to tell them how they could learn from Britain’s long history of democracy.

Jonathan Powell started out by explaining how Kazakhstan would be a vastly better country if it could have its own Rolls-Royce-class Whitehall civil service system, free of corruption.

But he ended up reopening an old domestic feud by launching a personal attack on a fellow former British mandarin who compared Mr Blair’s New Labour government to Hitler’s Third Reich.

Feud: Jonathan Powell, right, reopened an old domestic feud by launching a personal attack on former British mandarin Sir Richard Packer, left, who compared Mr Blair’s New Labour government to Hitler’s Third Reich

After complaining how hard it was to get rid of troublesome civil servants in Britain, Mr Powell said the Government was forced to give a £1 million payoff to the official who was ‘to blame for the mad cow disease’ crisis in the early days of Mr Blair’s Premiership.

He did not name the official, but he didn’t have to: Sir Richard Packer, permanent secretary at the Ministry of Agriculture in the late Nineties, last night said he had no doubt Mr Powell was referring to him.

Mr Powell, along with Mr Blair, has been advising Kazakh President Nursultan Nazarbayev in a deal reportedly worth up to £16 million.

Kazakhstan has faced widespread concern over human rights abuses, the treatment of the president’s political opponents and brutality and murder by its police force. Its civil service is riddled with corruption and nepotism.

Speaking at Nazarbayev’s State Management Academy, Mr Powell told his audience of the dictator’s apparatchiks: ‘When we came to power in 1997, there was a high-ranking official in the Agriculture Ministry who was fully accountable for the outbreak of mad cow disease in the country.’

Aide: Jonathan Powell is pictured with Tony Blair in 2007

According to a Kazakh news agency, Mr Powell said: ‘Nothing happened when we asked him to resign. We were told it was impossible to fire him and the best option was to promote him off this position.

'In the end, we had to pay him £1 million worth of termination fee. It is very difficult to get rid of such unwanted officials.’

Sir Richard told The Mail on Sunday: ‘I have come across reports of Jonathan Powell bad-mouthing me before. It is something he has got in his head for some reason, I don’t know why. I might have spoken to him twice.

‘It all seems very strange and is also quite factually wrong. He seems to be accusing me of being responsible for BSE. I don’t see how anyone who knew anything, which doesn’t include Powell, could say that. The BSE report says something completely different. Mr Powell should check his facts.’

After leaving his Whitehall job, Sir Richard was fiercely critical of the Blair government. He told the BBC: ‘In one respect . . . [the Blair government] reminded me of the Third Reich where . . . nobody would know where ultimate responsibility lay.’

Last night, Sir Richard denied having received a £1 million payoff, saying: ‘It depends how you add it up. I was there for more than 30 years (and) you can make up a very big figure with pensions and what have you.

‘The implication of the £1 million is that I was paid over and above what I was entitled to. It was fully within the rules. Once again, Powell’s rhetoric is completely at variance with the facts.’

Mr Powell was unavailable for comment.

Horse Meat

2013-04-10T09:25:00.003+01:00

Imported horses ‘missing’

The Sunday Times Published: 7 April 2013

Horsemeat on sale in Germany: thousands of imported horses may have ended up in British food (Ingo Wagner)

Thousands of horses imported to Britain from Europe have “disappeared”, fuelling fears that they ended up in our food.

Britain usually imports about 8,000 horses a year, including thoroughbreds for the racing industry and ponies for young riders. Many are slaughtered, however, and the UK exports horsemeat worth more than £4m a year.

New figures from the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs show that in two exceptional years Britain imported huge numbers of animals.

In 2009, 22,209 arrived and 15,611 in 2011. At the same time, there was no noticeable increase in the number slaughtered or in the amount of horsemeat exported.

Mary Creagh, shadow environment secretary, said: “Where did these animals go? It was a recession, British people were getting rid of their horses and yet huge numbers of animals were brought in and simply disappeared.”

The figures add to mounting evidence that criminals played a major role in contaminating beef in food with horsemeat.

Police and food safety officials have tracked consignments of meat to Britain concluding, “it arrived as beef and, in some cases, left as something else”, according to a source with detailed knowledge of the inquiry.

Tony Blair

2013-03-18T11:04:00.001+00:00

Tony Blair, Kazakh police and human rights questions

Tony Blair is helping Kazakhstan reform its brutal police force after widespread concern that it is at the forefront of human rights abuses in the country.

Tony Blair with the President of Kazakhstan, Nursultan Nazarbayev, inside 10 Downing Street in 2006 Photo: AFP/GETTY

By Jason Lewis, Investigations Editor
8:00AM GMT 17 Mar 2013

The former prime minister agreed to help as President Nursultan Nazarbayev attempts to quell international criticism of a massacre of oil workers which threatens his hopes for a new international trade deal.
The dictator’s police and special forces shot and killed 15 striking oil workers and wounded more than 100 during an industrial dispute in Zhanaozen, in the south west of the central Asian country.
Mr Nazarbayev had praised their actions in “restoring order” before video evidence emerged on the internet showing the police massacring unarmed civilians.
The incident, in December 2011, led to criticism from international human rights groups and, crucially, the European Parliament, threatening to undermine his plans for membership of the World Trade Organisation, which would mean lower customs tariffs and a place at the international negotiating table.
The country is a key client of one of Tony Blair’s multi-million pound consultancy practices, with a contract reportedly worth £16 million. After the massacre, the president asked for help in managing the crisis.
Mr Blair did not take part in discussions directly but last March, as MEPs put the finishing touches to a resolution urging “the Kazakh authorities to make every effort to improve human rights” and “strongly condemning the violent crackdown by police against demonstrators”, the former prime minister sent his most trusted long term adviser, Jonathan Powell, the ex-Downing Street chief of staff, to Astana, the Kazakh capital.

Riot police patrol in the town of Zhanaozen in Kazakhstan on December 18, 2011

He arrived as the EU linked its demands for Kazakhstan to “rapidly improve their respect for the freedom of assembly, association, expression and religion” to “the road map for WTO accession”.
Mr Powell, the man who negotiated with the IRA and helped shape the dossier of evidence for the first Iraq war, now runs Inter Mediate, a charity addressing “poverty, disease and economic stagnation that are the inevitable by-products of violence and political unrest”.
In Kazakhstan, he found himself sitting down with the hard line interior minister, attempting to reform the repressive police force to satisfy the EU and those backing Kazakhstan, with its rich mineral deposits and £27 billion of foreign investment, in its bid to become a full trading partner with the West.
In the meeting Mr Powell and the minister, Kalmukhanbet Kasymov, were said to have “exchanged opinions on … the improvement and democratisation of the police”. Sources said that the consultation covered all aspects of policing including the Interior Ministry’s special forces troops – modelled on the Soviet system – which were deployed in Zhanaozen.
A Kazakh government spokesman said they also discussed “regulation of police work, training, upgrading equipment”.
Mr Powell was most recently in Astana last month talking to President Nazarbayev’s advisers but is not thought to have played any further direct role in police reform.
But there have been at least three further sessions with Mr Blair’s team – which includes a Harvard educated lawyer and a former UN human rights official – including one at the offices of Blair Associates in Astana, on fighting crime and “maintaining public order and security”.
A Kazakh source said the sessions were “full of mutual understanding and efficient dialogue”.
But last night this was dismissed as a “smokescreen” by Kazakh opposition leader Zhambolat Mamai, who has led calls for Mr Blair to resign from his advisory role. He said that the trigger for Mr Blair’s involvement was the threat from the European parliament and Western governments.
“They invited these experts and are now able to say work is going on, they are improving everything, but in fact they are creating a smokescreen,” he said.
He added: “The Interior Ministry is very much in control of the situation in Kazakhstan, and believe me they will never let these Western consultants get close to understanding the real problems of our system.”
The December 2011 violence erupted after the government ignored protests from striking oil workers over pay and conditions. Police claimed that they were defending themselves until internet footage backed witness accounts of the security forces shooting indiscriminately at unarmed demonstrators.
Earlier this year Human Rights Watch said that in 2012 Kazakh authorities intensified “persecution of outspoken government critics” without having “seriously tackled long standing, grave human rights abuses”.
A spokesman for Mr Blair’s office said: “As is well known, we work to support the government of Kazakhstan on key areas of social, political and economic reform.
“This has included discussing aspects of police reform – something which was publicised by the government at the time.
“This work is entirely in line with the work of other international organisations and Western governments and follows the direction which the international community wants Kazakhstan to take.”
He added: “Zhanaozen was a tragedy, but there are indications that the government is addressing the underlying causes. This includes police reform, plans for local government reform and economic measures to help improve the lives of people living in these types of towns, which are a hangover from the Soviet era.”

Russia

2013-03-11T10:31:00.001+00:00

Spying claims against top British diplomat threaten Anglo-Russian détente

As William Hague and Philip Hammond prepare to meet their Russian counterparts in London this week, Jason Lewis reveals how a very suspicious spying slur is threatening to derail the reconciliation.

Denis Keefe, right, in the Caucasus, at Black Cliff Lake

By Jason Lewis, Investigations Editor
9:00PM GMT 09 Mar 2013

To the outside world he is the epitome of diplomatic decorum: polite, softly spoken, with razor-sharp intellect. He has friends all over eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union, where he has a record of distinguished service on behalf of Britain, and is known for his keen ear for choral music and love of sailing.
Having joined the Foreign Office 30 years ago, straight out of Cambridge, he has earned a reputation for his brilliant mind and as an unfailingly safe pair of hands.
And yet to the astonishment of those who know him, Denis Keefe, the respected deputy ambassador to Russia, has for the past few months been trailed by a bizarre cloud of rumours and intrigue straight out of a Jason Bourne film.
Wherever Mr Keefe goes outside Moscow, he runs the risk of being accosted by Russian journalists and accused of being a spy.
Regional news reports froth with insinuations that he is something far more subversive than a diplomat, and has been sent by Britain to ferret out information and undermine the government of President Vladimir Putin.
British officials have tried to play down official anger at the hounding of Mr Keefe, which The Sunday Telegraph is reporting for the first time in Britain.
But the accusations, described by diplomatic sources as “an unprecedented attack on a very senior diplomat”, threaten to cast a shadow over a meeting this week in London designed to “reset” the thorny relationship between Britain and Russia.
William Hague, the Foreign Secretary, and Philip Hammond, the Defence Secretary, will meet their Russian counterparts for a “strategic dialogue” intended to look beyond a series of angry rows that have hampered cooperation between the two countries.
They include the recent decision to grant asylum in Britain to Andrei Borodin, a billionaire former Russian banker accused by Moscow of fraud, Russia’s attempts to hinder investigations into the poisoning in London of the former spy Alexander Litvinenko, and the beginning this week of the posthumous “show trial” of the late Sergei Magnitsky.
Magnitsky, a Russian lawyer who worked for a London-based hedge fund, uncovered what is thought to be the largest tax fraud ever committed in Russia, but on reporting it was himself imprisoned, and later died in custody, aged 37.
The allegations against Mr Keefe are being seen in some circles as a deliberate attempt to discredit British officials in Moscow and to undermine efforts to improve relations with Russia.
Last month, the career diplomat, who speaks six languages including fluent Russian, was confronted by a Russian journalist, who demanded: “They say you are a spy for MI6 – tell us, does James Bond exist?”
Evidently irritated, Mr Keefe, 54, replied: “I don’t think this is a serious matter or that it has anything to do with me.”
Another reporter pressed him on his alleged MI6 status: “Can you give a straightforward answer to this question? Do you confirm or deny it?” He was quoted as replying: “Please. This is not a serious question. Please …”
Mr Keefe, a father of six who lists his interests as singing, sailing, walking and learning languages, was also questioned about his links to Russian opposition figures.
One of his first diplomatic postings, on joining the Foreign Office in 1982, was to Prague. Before the 1989 Velvet Revolution, he made friends with opponents of the one-party state, including Vaclav Havel. He later returned to help the newly democratic Czech Republic prepare to join Nato and the European Union.
He was also ambassador to Georgia during the 2008 Russo-Georgian War, and several reports used that against him – accusing him of becoming involved in the dispute over the breakaway region of South Ossetia. One report said he “actively advocated Georgia’s accession to Nato and urged speedy modernisation of its army, presenting Russia as a direct threat to the former Soviet republic”.
Neither episode endeared him to hardliners in the Putin regime and the incidents appear calculated to undermine him. A Siberian television channel, NTN-4, devoted a two-and-a-half minute slot to alleging that a former spy had listed Mr Keefe “as an officer of the secret intelligence service”. It stated that “in MI6, like in our intelligence services, there is no such thing as a former officer”.
The presenter questioned whether it was wise to invite Mr Keefe — “an intelligence service officer of a foreign country” — to Akademgorodok, a university town which is the hub of Russia’s cutting edge science and nuclear research.
In December, Mr Keefe faced a similar attack on a visit to the Ural Mountains to award diplomas to Open University graduates. One report bluntly stated: “Denis Keefe can be described as an undercover spy with his diplomatic position serving as a smoke screen.”
A news website warned students, officials and teachers to be wary in case Mr Keefe tried to “recruit” them. “A person well-versed in recruiting agents like Denis Keefe, bearing in mind his serious diplomatic experience, could easily catch in his net the immature soul of a graduate or a participant in Britain’s Open University programme,” it said.
“And you don’t need a codebreaker to work out what that could lead to.”
Diplomatic sources have told The Sunday Telegraph that the continuing allegations, which appeared to stem from a discredited list of MI6 agents posted online in 2005, were “ridiculous”.
They come after painstaking efforts to rebuild Anglo-Russian relations, following the Litvinenko poisoning in London in 2006.
An inquest into his death will open on May 1, but his murder led to a series of tit-for-tat diplomatic expulsions. The then British ambassador, Anthony Brenton, was subjected to a four-month campaign of harassment, with members of a pro-Kremlin youth group interrupting his speeches, stalking him at weekends and banging fists on his diplomatic Jaguar.
In an embarrassing revelation, British agents were caught red-handed using a transmitter hidden inside a fake rock, planted on a Moscow street, so spies could pass them secrets.
At the same time, Russian police raided offices of the British Council, claiming that the body – which promotes British culture abroad – had violated Russian laws, including tax regulation.
“It is a cultural, not a political institution and we strongly reject any attempt to link it to Russia’s failure to cooperate with our efforts to bring the murderer of Alexander Litvinenko to justice,” said a Foreign Office spokesman at the time.
Leading British companies, including BP, faced problems operating in Russia, which had a negative effect on trade for both countries. More than 600 UK companies are active in Russia and Russian firms account for about a quarter of foreign share flotations on the London Stock Exchange.
Two years ago, David Cameron signed a series of trade deals and a symbolic memorandum on cooperation, and this week’s meeting in London was seen as an important “incremental step” towards restoring relations with the Russians.
But the timing of the attacks on Mr Keefe, coupled with continuing pressure to extradite the main suspects in the murder of Mr Litvinenko, a British citizen, provide an uncomfortable backdrop. On Saturday night Whitehall sources insisted that difficult issues, including the murder, would “not be left outside the room” at this week’s meeting.
But MI6 was again accused last week of being at the centre of another anti-Russian conspiracy – this time in connection with Monday’s opening of the trial of Magnitsky.
He is charged with defrauding the Russian state, along with the British-based millionaire businessman Bill Browder, the head of Hermitage Capital Management, which employed Magnitsky. Mr Browder has declined to go to Moscow for the trial.
A widely viewed television documentary in Russia last week accused the two men of being part of an MI6 conspiracy to undermine the Russian government.
An investment fund auditor, Magnitsky said he had uncovered a £150 million tax fraud involving Russian government officials, but was then arrested himself on accusations of fraud.
He died in prison in 2009, having been denied visits from his family, forced into increasingly squalid cells, and ultimately contracting pancreatitis. Despite repeated requests, he was refused medical assistance and died, having been put in a straitjacket and showing signs of beatings. The case has become a rallying call for critics of Mr Putin’s regime, who accuse the state of a campaign of intimidation against political opponents.

German Gorbuntsov was gunned down, Alexander Litvinenko was poisoned, Andrei Borodin was granted asylum

The meeting equally comes against the background of a “lack of will” by the Russian authorities to help solve the attempted murder of the Russian banker German Gorbuntsov, who was shot six times outside his flat near Canary Wharf in March last year.
Mr Gorbuntsov claimed that the attempt on his life was linked to people close to Mr Putin, and his decision to help the police investigate the attempted murder of his business partner in Moscow in 2009.
Initially, Russian police offered to cooperate, but Scotland Yard later said it was having trouble getting permission to send investigators to Moscow.
A senior Brtitish source said: “The Russians do not understand that our officials and judiciary take independent decisions, that our media asks tough questions and that the British Government insists that British citizens’ rights and lives should be protected.
“It is a major cultural difference. It continues to make our relationship with Russia tricky.”

Silent Calls

2013-03-04T10:18:00.001+00:00

Named: British Gas and other major firms making billions of unwanted calls every year

The companies responsible for inundating British homes with nuisance calls can be named.

British Gas alone is making marketing calls to about 4.1million homes each year Photo: PA

By Jason Lewis, Investigations editor
8:00AM GMT 03 Mar 2013

A string of firms, including major household names, are making millions of unsolicited calls to landlines each year in the hope of gaining business.
Some of the calls are silent, causing irritation, fear and confusion, particularly for the elderly and vulnerable.
Until now the scale of the problem, and the companies behind it, have been unclear. However a Sunday Telegraph investigation can disclose:
* British homes are receiving up to 3.2billion nuisance calls every year;
* Companies making the calls include British Gas; TalkTalk, a broadband provider; Homeserve, a plumbing and heating firm; and a series of companies selling everything from double glazing to financial services;
* British Gas alone is making marketing calls to about 4.1million homes each year;
* Ofcom, the communications regulator, allows silent calls as long as they exceed no more than three in every hundred calls made, opening the way for large companies to hang up on people hundreds of thousands times without breaking the law.
Marketing calls are hugely profitable for those involved in making them and their use has increased dramatically because of computer equipment which allows hundreds of numbers to be dialled at once.
These computerised diallers ring a householder’s number and are then designed to connect a member of staff in the call centre when the equipment registers that it has been answered by a person.
However, if no operator is available no one answers, causing silence at the other end of the line. Some play a message apologising for the call, others simply hang up.
MPs are increasingly concerned about the problem.
Alun Cairns, a Conservative backbencher, said: “Certain groups of people, particularly the elderly who may be at home all day, will not answer their telephone unless they recognise the number because they are so concerned about nuisance calls. Some people tell me that they are getting five or six of these sorts of calls every day.
“And when these calls are silent that causes real concern for the elderly whose first thought may be that it is someone they know who is in trouble and can’t speak or that it is someone out to frighten and intimidate them. This simply cannot be allowed to continue.”
The Sunday Telegraph can provide the most detailed analysis yet of the leading firms behind these calls.
Calls received by 20,000 households with a special answering unit attached to their telephones called trueCall, which allows people to block unwanted incoming numbers, provide a snapshot of which companies are making the most unsolicited calls.
In the past 12 months 5,000 trueCall machines were connected to the internet to send an electronic record of all calls they received to a central database, including the telephone number of the firm behind the calls and how many times it dialled individual customers.
The trueCall users were also invited to comment on who was calling them, providing further evidence of which company was involved and, over 12 months, built a “top ten” list of nuisance callers.
Our analysis highlights how British Gas, the energy company, made almost 7,000 calls to 900 of the homes using a trueCall device – more than seven calls a year to each of them. If that pattern is repeated to all UK homes, it represents 28million unsolicited calls each year.
A British Gas spokesman said: “This is a highly regulated area and we take our obligations extremely seriously. When we do call customers it is always with their permission or when we have undertaken all relevant checks to confirm consent.
“We uphold the highest standards of customer service and when calling it is to offer people information on products and services that may save them money or offer peace-of-mind, such as boiler care.”
British Gas registered the highest calls rate from a single 0800 number. But evidence suggests that other well-known firms are calling British homes as much, if not more than, the energy firm. Homeserve, TalkTalk and Npower used a series of numbers, possibly related to different call centres.
Our surveyed homes received 892 calls from Npower, 1,038 from Homeserve and 10,396 calls from TalkTalk. Although it was not possible to analyse these calls in the same way as those coming from a single number to see how many individual homes were called by the companies, it would suggest that they are calling millions every year as part of marketing campaigns.
However, most of the firms that appear to be making the greatest number of calls to consumers in our survey are not household names.
The firms included Curved Air, a telemarketing firm in Blackburn and Nationwide Energy Services, a Swansea-based firm offering ways to save on household bills. Between them, our survey suggested they called about six million homes last year.
Other companies identified included Ismart, a firm offering to pursue claims for mis-sold payment protection insurance; and DLG Surveys, which carries out consumer lifestyle surveys.
All of the firms that responded to our questions insisted that they did not break Ofcom rules and that consumers benefited from their calls.
The regulator last year imposed fines of £750,000 on Homeserve and £60,000 on Npower, for making “an excessive number of silent and abandoned calls”.
Ofcom’s investigation found that Homeserve exceeded the “abandoned call rate” on 42 occasions during the period between February 1 and March 21, 2011, resulting in an estimated 14,756 calls.
Ofcom rules forbid companies from making repeat calls within 24 hours, but Homeserve was found to have made 36,218 of these calls.
However our investigation raises significant questions over the role of Ofcom. It allows operators to “drop” 3per cent of all calls made, which can run into hundreds if not thousands of silent or incomplete calls every day.
Ofcom levied fines on the companies whose marketing campaigns involved silent calls, but refused to disclose the names of the companies which made the calls, because in both cases they had been subcontracted by household names. It means firms that hire the outsourced call centres would not know they have infringed the rules before.
Ofcom said that because it was up to the company on whose behalf the calls were made to stay within the rules it would not name them, adding that it would be “prejudicial” to the call centre firms.
A spokesman said: “It is a company’s responsibility to ensure that if a third party makes calls on its behalf, it complies with Ofcom’s rules on silent and abandoned calls. We may of course, in future, decide to investigate outsourced call centres and, if we do so, this information would be published subject to the legal restrictions on disclosure.”
TalkTalk, one of the firms under investigation by Ofcom for making excessive silent calls to consumers, has named the call centre operator that it used in the marketing campaign which is under scrutiny.
Ofcom said that it has “reasonable” proof that TalkTalk persistently broke the rules between February and March 2011 at two call centres, one in the UK and one in South Africa.
TalkTalk said that the calls were made by workers at Teleperformance in Cape Town, South Africa, after it ended a contract with the French-owned call centre operator.
Alistair Niederer, chief executive of Teleperformance UK, said: “This was a very regrettable, extremely rare incident which was the result of human error by 14 employees in South Africa, a tiny fraction of our global workforce of 135,000.”
Last night MPs called for Ofcom to change its approach. Mr Cairns said: “It is about time that the regulators remembered they are there to protect consumers rather than the commercial interests of the firms involved.”
He said that he hoped to persuade the Government to tackle the issue of nuisance calls in legislation.
Mr Cairns said that current regulations were too weak, with responsibilities divided between Ofcom and the Information Commissioner’s Office.
Mike Crockart, a Liberal Democrat MP who is setting up a House of Commons all-party committee on nuisance calls, said: “For these people the phone might be the only real contact they have with the outside world. If, every time they answer a call, they find themselves asked to answer a survey or persuaded to sign up for a service they don’t need, it makes them reluctant to answer – cutting them off from the outside world.”
Steve Smith, director of trueCall, who carried out the research, said “Older people are particularly vulnerable; they may be confused by telemarketing calls, agree to order products they don’t need, or may be taken advantage of by persistent and unscrupulous callers.”
David Hickson, of the pressure group Fair Telecoms Campaign, said: “The regulatory approach taken by Ofcom is not working. Taking years over imposing sizeable penalties on a handful of big name offenders is ineffective.
“Ofcom should take action whenever it has reasonable grounds for believing that someone is habitually engaged in activity likely to cause annoyance.”
Ofcom said that it had commissioned further research into the problem.

Top 10 numbers most blocked by trueCall users
Company. Extrapolated figure for UK calls

1. British Gas 4.1m

2. Curved Air 3.7m

3. I-smart 2.2m

4. Unknown telemarketing firm using number registered in Leeds 2 m

5. National Moneysavers 1.7m

6. Still active number previously attributed to defunct marketing firm 1st Call Connect 1.63m

7. Nationwide Energy Services 1.6m

8. DLG Surveys, known as 'Consumer lifestyles’ 1.1m

9. Loft Insulation 0.9m

10. Moorcroft debt recovery 0.3m

* Sunday Telegraph analysis based on calls made to 5,407 trueCall homes between February 15th 2012 and February 14th 2013.

Silent calls

2013-03-04T10:12:00.000+00:00

Silent calls: how the marketing firms deliver potential customers

Marketing calls are hugely profitable for those involved in making them Photo: Alamy

By Jason Lewis, Investigations editor
8:00AM GMT 03 Mar 2013

Curved Air Marketing Solutions Limited, is a market research company based in Blackburn. It claims it get 20,000 people a week to complete one of its telephone marketing surveys.
Around 800 trueCall users were called 1,176 times by the firm during the last year. If the pattern were repeated across Britain this would represent 3.7 million calls to home phones a year from the firm. The company began trading two years ago and is yet to post a profit.
It is run by William Taylor, a Northwich-based businessman who is also the chairman of a finance company, a Blackburn roofing firm and was previously a director of a series of kitchen design businesses.
According to Curved Air’s website it creates a “database of potential customers that continually grows leads for you, our client” through the people it calls completing 20,000 surveys a week. The company did not respond to requests for comment.

National Energy Services Limited, based in Swansea, telephoned 339 members of trueCall panel 2,135 times in the last 12 months. This would represent 1.6 million calls to British homes during the year.
According to its website, the firm is the “UK’s largest provider of energy efficiency surveys” and, it says, is “dedicated to helping home-owners and businesses claim the government grants available to make energy efficient upgrades to their properties”.
The firm had a turnover of £16 million last year and is part of the Save Britain Money group run by Neville Wilshire, who runs a series of other firms including Fuelswitch.co.uk and Debts Reduced Limited.
The company has gone from six to 600 employees in four years, expanded to have a call centre in Cardiff which was opened by Craig Bellamy, the footballer, and is to feature in a fly-on-the-wall documentary on BBC3 later this year.
Mr Wilshire says that his firm offers energy efficiency surveys, reclaiming payment protection insurance, fuel efficiency advice and debt management.
A spokesman for the firm said: “To help people access the funding available we call potential customers in their homes from our UK contact centre. At NES we have strict processes and procedures. Our technology is Ofcom compliant. Even with all the technology that is available and our very successful quality control methods; it is inevitable that a small percentage of people contacted will not be fully satisfied with the call.”

Ismart Consumer Solutions calls were intercepted 1,284 times by 483 trueCall machines in our survey, representing 2.2 million calls a year across the country.
It says it is “a leading payment protection insurance (PPI) claims company, having helped thousands of customers reclaim mis-sold PPI cover”.
It claims that “customers find us through carefully selected partnerships” or “ purely through word of mouth” but in fact makes large numbers of “cold” calls to canvas for business.
Founded by David Haycock, 33, Ryan Horne, 32, and Dylan Pritchett, 33, its most recent accounts show it had a turnover of £6.5million, and paid the three directors £515,000 in salaries and shares.
Last year it was accused of demanding huge fees for its help with one customer who was reportedly awarded £2,365 compensation ending up getting nothing and receiving a £890 bill for commission from the firm.
Paul Fakley, its marketing director, said: “We take great pride in the fact that many of the calls we make ultimately result in significant financial benefits to consumers who make claims through us. Without our marketing activity many consumers would likely miss out on the opportunity to get back what is rightfully theirs. We abide by all Ofcom regulations that apply to us.”

Horse Meat

2013-02-27T12:16:00.003+00:00

British food safety officials were warned of horse meat fraud a year ago

By Jason Lewis, Investigations Editor

British officials ignored three official warnings that fraudulently labelled horse meat was in circulation in Europe and may have been passed off as beef.

The Europe wide confidential alerts were put out by the Italian and Danish food safety authorities as long ago as February last year - 11 months before horse meat was found in beef products on sale in British supermarkets.

The alerts now appears to be the first official evidence of fraud involving cheap horse meat being passed off as more expensive beef. But there is no evidence the warning was ever acted on by British food safety officials who dismissed the reports because the incidents did not involve the UK.

At the same time UK officials failed to notify their EU partners for up to nine months that horse meat destined for the tables of Europe had been exported from Britain containing “bute”, the veterinary drug which is banned from entering the food chain because it is a potential threat to human health.

The Sunday Telegraph can also disclose:

* How official ignored warnings from the Government’s own independent scientists that the “life threatening” drug “bute” was finding its way into meat exports.

* That senior officials from the food safety regulator lobbied for an end to daily inspections at meat cutting plants in favour of giving producers advanced warning of its visits.

* How senior officials from the Government’s Food Standards Agency (FSA) accepted hospitality from some of the food companies at the centre of the horse meat scandal.

The new details underline how the FSA and the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Defra) failed to act before the full scale of the horse meat scandal became apparent.

The Sunday Telegraph can reveal that the first warnings on horse meat fraud were sent to senior UK officials on February 1, February 15 and March 7 last year.

They warned of a “suspicion of fraud in relation to horse carcasses and horse meat” from Hungary and Denmark, some of which was processed in Italy.

Categorised in the EU database as “adulteration/fraud”, much of the meat is believed to have been seized but some is reported to have been distributed probably to Belgium, Denmark and France for human consumption.

The confidential alerts, seen by this newspaper, were emailed to a special mail box at the Food Standards Agency, to UK health officials, environmental health officers, customs officers at Britain’s ports and two senior Foreign Office representatives at the European Parliament.

Two of the horse meat fraud alerts, known as “information for follow up”, were a formal Europe-wide “notification of risk” about “a product that is or may be placed on the market”.

The third alert, known as “information for attention”, was designed to warn all European countries about a fraud involving horse meat after the illegally labelled goods were seized by officials in Italy.

The notifications, backed by European legislation, were sent via Europe’s Rapid Alert System for Food and Feed (RASFF) set up to alert EU countries to imminent threats to public health. The network is run by the European Commission and managed in the UK by the FSA.

Last night it was unclear what, if any action, was taken by the FSA or any other British food safety officials in response to the specific warning before routine tests by Irish authorities last month discovered horse meat in beefburgers sold in supermarket chains including Tesco, Britain’s biggest retailer.

An FSA spokeswoman said it was aware of the earlier European warnings on horse meat fraud but that it had not been connected to the UK. She said: “The FSA is aware of these alerts through the RASFF system.

“The country entering the alert is required to give full details of where the product has been distributed. None of this meat entered the UK.”

At the same time, it can be disclosed, British officials have confirmed that they failed to notify their counterparts in France and Holland that horse meat exported from the UK contained phenylbutazone, known as bute, which is a risk to human health.

On one occasion it took Britain nine months to alert officials in Holland that chilled horse meat exported for food from the UK for Dutch consumers contained the banned substance.

FSA officials took a sample of horse meat in May 2012 but they only alerted the Dutch to the “unauthorised substance” in the meat early this month. The chilled meat is sold as “fresh” and is not stored for more than a few days, meaning the contaminated meat would almost certainly have been eaten.

The alerts are supposed to be urgent warnings. According to the European Commission RASFF “Alert notifications are sent when a food or feed presenting a serious health risk is on the market and when rapid action is required.”

It says it is up SFA and other British officials to identify the problem and take the relevant actions. It says: “The goal of the notification is to give all RASFF members the information to confirm whether the product in question is on their market, so that they can also take the necessary measures.”

In four other cases the FSA took between two and four months to alert French officials that samples of British chilled horse meat they had tested before it was exported for French consumption was also contaminated with the veterinary drug. Again it is unlikely, given the shelf life of chilled meat, that the contaminated product had not already been consumed.

Last night the FSA spokeswoman confirmed that five of the horses containing bute had ended up in the food chain. She said: “We are working with the French and Dutch authorities to identify where this meat was consumed.”

She said that in the passed tests for but had taken three weeks to complete and were done at the same time that the meat was exported. She added that since the end of January all British horse meat was being tested and cleared for human consumption before it was allowed to leave the UK.

A senior official from the Direction General de L’Alimentation, part of the French Ministry of Agriculture, told the Sunday Telegraph: “What you have to ask is whether this meat in which the phenylbutazone was allegedly found was then exported to France.

“Under normal circumstances, it would not have left the abattoir after being found to contain the phenylbutazone. If it was exported then this is not a health issue, it is fraud.

“In short. It should have been destroyed, if it wasn’t this is fraud. If meat arrives for human consumption from the UK here in France, we assume it is fit for human consumption. We don’t test it all over again.”

He added: “I don’t believe we should be pointing the finger at the food health authorities in France or in the UK. From experience when they know something they do something about it straight away and any doubt means precaution. It’s when they don’t know that is the problem.”

Britain exports between 8,000 and 9,000 horses for consumption in Europe every year. But until this month, when officials introduced new rules that meant all horse meat had to be tested for bute before it was exported, the FSA only tested a small per cent of the carcasses every year.

According to a report by Defra’s Veterinary Residues Committee last July only 68 horses were tested for bute before they were exported in the whole of 2011.The independent scientific advisory committee said it had “repeatedly expressed concern over residues of ‘bute’ entering the food chain.”

It warned bute had “potential for serious adverse effects in consumers” including the “rare but very serious, life threatening, condition” blood discrasia which is similar to leukaemia or haemophilia.

But its report warned that Defra’s “follow up investigations in recent years have found that some vets are still prescribing phenybutazone (bute) without...ensuring that the horse is subsequently signed out of the food chain.

“Phenylbutazone residues have also been found in horse that have changed owners prior to going to slaughter (which have not) been signed out of the food chain.

“Other residues have occurred because feeding containing “bute” intended for one horse has allegedly been eaten by another horse.”

The report revealed that in cases where bute was found in a horse which had not been declared unfit for consumption the owner and the vet have been “advised about food chain requirements”.

The Crown Prosecution Service said they believe there have been no prosecutions regarding fraudulent trading of horse, or any other meat. However it added that there are no central records of these sort of offences.

Katrice Lee

2013-01-21T11:13:00.002+00:00

I just want to know what happened to my Katrice

When Sharon Lee’s daughter vanished from an army base, she expected help and sympathy – not to feel that she was at fault. Thirty years on, the Military Police has finally apologised and is to reopen the case

Sharon Lee: 'I remember that morning. It was the last time I ever held her'

By Jason Lewis, Investigations Editor, Sunday Telegraph

7:00AM GMT 20 Jan 2013

Every parent knows the feeling. The moment when you turn to look for your child and they are not there. The fear and panic, followed by an intense wave of relief when you find them again.

But for one mother, Sharon Lee, that feeling of relief has never come.

It is now more than 30 years since her two-year-old daughter Katrice vanished without trace during a shopping trip on a military base in Germany. All Sharon has left today are a few yellowing photographs of a happy little girl playing on a swing and smiling alongside her older sister.

As well as dealing with the guilt and heartbreak over the loss of her child, Mrs Lee has also faced a battle with the British Army which, she believes, was intent on blaming her for the little girl’s disappearance while denying that they could have done more to find her.

The Ministry of Defence has now reopened the case, finally acknowledging that its original investigation was “flawed”. It has also apologised for its appalling treatment of Mrs Lee and her family, and promised an independent review by a civilian police force.
Katrice disappeared from a military shopping centre in Paderborn, Germany, on November 28 1981 – her second birthday. Mother and daughter had gone to the NAAFI store to buy items for a party while her father, Richard Lee, a sergeant in the King’s Royal Hussars, waited in the car outside.

“I remember that morning. It was the last time I ever held my daughter,” says Mrs Lee. “Katrice was excited. It was her second birthday. She didn’t really quite understand what that meant, but she’d had her presents and she knew something special was going on.
“My husband drove us. We couldn’t find a parking space, so he waited in the car while my sister Wendy, Katrice and I went inside. It was packed with people as it was the last Army pay day before Christmas. Katrice didn’t want to sit in the trolley – she demanded to be carried, and I held her while we did the shopping.”
Then she disappeared. “We had reached the checkout,” recalls Mrs Lee. “We had started putting our shopping on to the conveyor belt. As I was getting the items out I realised I had forgotten to get crisps for the party. I put Katrice down and said to my sister, 'Just watch her while I nip back and get them.’ ”
“The shop was jam-packed full. Wendy was putting stuff out on the conveyor belt. I didn’t want to push back through the crowds carrying Katrice, so I just asked Wendy to watch her for two minutes. It was as simple as that.

Together: Katrice Lee with her older sister Natasha

“I don’t blame Wendy,” she adds. “How could you blame her? Why would you think that your daughter was going to disappear that morning when you were just out on a family shop for her birthday? It should have been a joyous occasion.
“Wendy didn’t deliberately let her run off. It is just one of those things that children do. Even when they are standing with their parents, children still run off to look at something. When I left Katrice with Wendy she may have seen me run down the aisle and may have followed me. I don’t know. Who knows what’s in the mind of a two-year-old? Maybe she thought Mummy was having a game with her and she followed me. I don’t know. All I know is that after I put her down, I never saw her again. That was the last time I ever saw my daughter.”
When she came back, Katrice wasn’t there. “The panic hit me. I ran around, calling her name. She was gone. Vanished.”
The rest of the day was a blur. A military policewoman was at one of the other checkouts and radioed for assistance. Soon a full-scale search was under way.
“I remember very little else about that day. My life was changed forever; it was the beginning of a waking nightmare.”
From the start, the military were convinced that Katrice had simply wandered off. “They thought I hadn’t kept a proper eye on her. I remember soon after she disappeared, the Royal Military Police came to our married quarters. They were friendly but I’ve come to wish I’d said nothing. They asked me whether Katrice liked ducks and I quite innocently said, 'Yes, of course, don’t all children like ducks?’
“Looking back, that seems to have sealed my daughter’s fate. The Royal Military Police and the local German police decided that she had walked out of the shop and wandered to the nearby river and fallen in and drowned.”
Yet that explanation would have involved Katrice walking out of the shop on her own, down a ramp, across a busy car park, through a hedge, and along the river. “No one had seen her do this,” says Sharon. “But that is the only explanation they would allow. They searched the river, they couldn’t find her, but days and days were lost. They would not acknowledge that there could be any other explanation. Nothing we said would shake them from their conviction that she was a lost child.
“It was six weeks until they interviewed the cashiers in the shop. One of the cashiers came forward 20 years later and said she had never even been spoken to.”
The original investigation never considered the possibility that Katrice might have been abducted. The NAAFI was not inside a military compound, and there was no security surrounding it. It was on a civilian street. But the case has never been classified as a crime by the local German police.
When the theory that Katrice had wandered off produced no leads, Mrs Lee believes the military closed ranks to ensure that there was no suggestion that it failed to investigate the case thoroughly.
“We attempted to raise awareness of Katrice’s disappearance,” says Sharon. “We tried to arrange a collection to put money up for a reward for information. We intended to launch the collection to coincide with a planned visit by Princess Margaret. But at the last minute, the royal visit was cancelled and all the men, who had intended to help us raise the money, were confined to barracks.”
She claims that she has also seen an internal military assessment of the family, written by an Army psychologist, which dismisses Mrs Lee as a “woman of low intelligence”.
“We were treated without empathy or humanity. It was like we were an irritation, interrupting the strict discipline of the military. We had lost our daughter but we were in the way. They thought we should move on. Forget it. Not ask too many questions.”
Sharon, 59, a former HR manager from Gosport, Hampshire, and retired Sgt Major Richard Lee, 63, from Hartlepool – who has described his daughter’s disappearance as an “open wound” – divorced 20 years ago but remain united in their fight for the truth about what happened to Katrice.
They are also heavily involved in a support group for the families of other missing children, which includes Madeleine McCann’s parents Kate and Gerry.

Broken family: Sharon Lee pictured with her former husband Richard and daughters Katrice and Natasha

Last year they succeeded in getting the case re‑opened. The new investigation is, finally, focused on the theory that Katrice may have been abducted. Officers are interviewing witnesses ignored for three decades. They have produced an aged image of Katrice, who would now be 33, and have taken DNA samples from the family. They are also searching medical records. Katrice had a squint in one eye and would have required an operation. Officers are searching records for a child of the right age with the same eye condition.

Last week, defence minister Mark Francois wrote to the family acknowledging the failings in the case. In a statement, Mr Francois said: “The Royal Military Police have now acknowledged that the previous investigations were flawed, and have sincerely apologised to Katrice’s family for these failings.”
A letter to Iain Wright, her father’s MP and a former children’s minister, goes further. Mr Francois wrote: “As you know, I met with Mrs Sharon Lee on 13 December… At that meeting, Brigadier Bill Warren, the Provost Marshal (Army) acknowledged that the previous investigations were flawed.”
He added: “During the meeting, the Royal Military Police also discussed the current state of play on the work under way to better understand the actions taken by the police in 1981, and provided the family an opportunity to feed in their own thoughts and recollections from this period to the Senior Investigating Officer.”
“Mark Francois has been brilliant,” says Mrs Lee. “He is coming at it as a family man rather than as someone from the Ministry of Defence. He seems to have great sympathy for us as a family and what we have been through. He is the first person from the MoD in 30 years who was prepared to sit and meet with us and listen to what we had to say.”
She adds: “After so long, it is nice to finally hear that I am believed, that I am no longer being dismissed as a crazy woman who won’t go away, won’t move on.
“We still have had no explanation as to why we were not taken seriously, and why the Army tried to put the blame on us. We were dismissed as a family who failed to look after their daughter. From the beginning, there was a lack of humanity, a lack of care. One senior officer, just after Katrice disappeared, actually accused me of a lack of care of my daughter and said I had a 'terrible cross to bear’.
“At our meeting with the minister, we learnt that an investigator who came to our house the day Katrice disappeared to collect her pyjamas – to give her scent to the dogs – claimed that the only person in our quarters was our daughter Tasha. It was officially recorded that we had left our other daughter alone. But it was totally wrong. Our daughter was not alone. We wouldn’t have let her out of our sight. I was there, her best friend was there, other members of the family were there. But by recording this, it was as if someone was trying to emphasise the idea that we were negligent parents. That I was a bad mum, and the whole thing was my fault. That we didn’t care properly for our children.”
Natasha Lee, 38, was just seven when her sister disappeared. “But I still have vivid memories of my sister. I remember she was bright and bubbly. Cheeky. She used to follow me around. We shared a room most of the time. I was very proud of her. I was proud of being a big sister. Then she was gone.
“I remember my mother that day. After Katrice disappeared, I remember how she cried. The terrible sound she made. It haunts me.”
Natasha had stayed at home with her uncle that morning. Not being with them, there to look after her little sister, has left Natasha with an irrational feeling of guilt.
“I have terrible feelings about not going with them. No matter how much I tell myself it’s not my fault, I still feel guilty. That day robbed me of a normal childhood and of my sister, and the chance to grow up with her. She was only just two. Her personality was just starting to come through. Her disappearance has left a hole in my life. I look in the mirror and wonder if she looks like me. If I look like her.”
Both Mrs Lee and Natasha believe that Katrice was abducted. They live in hope that some day they will find out what happened.
“I believe she’s alive somewhere and that one day we might find her,” says Natasha. “She might not want to know me. I’d be OK with that. I just want to know she’s OK.”
“I hope that she was taken by someone who couldn’t have children,” says Mrs Lee. “I hope that whoever took her, loved her like I do, and brought her up and that she is happy somewhere.”
Last night, Iain Wright MP called on the Prime Minister to intervene in the case. He said: “This is not a political question. The answers to what happened to Katrice are almost certainly in Germany. I want David Cameron to talk to the German government and to get their help.
“After 30 years, the family deserve to know what happened to their daughter.”

Archbishop's family tree

2012-12-04T14:47:00.002+00:00

Archbishop

2012-12-03T15:47:00.001+00:00

Jews who fled the Nazis: secrets of Justin Welby's family tree

The German Jewish ancestors of Justin Welby, the next Archbishop of Canterbury, were forced to flee the Nazis and then faced internment in Britain during the war as “enemy aliens”.

Justin Welby, the next Archbishop of Canterbury Photo: Geoff Pugh for the Telegraph

By Jason Lewis, Investigations Editor7:20AM GMT 02 Dec 201221 Comments

The full story of Justin Welby’s family, which provides a snapshot of a family caught in the dramas and tragedies of 20th century Europe, can be told for the first time today.

It is a story which his own father concealed from him and it was only last weekend that Bishop Welby learned from The Telegraph of his German Jewish roots and how his family, the Weilers, came to Britain.

But while his father, Gavin, was making his fortune in New York, posing as an aristocrat and selling whisky, his close relations faced persecution in Germany and were forced to flee for their lives.

Gavin Welby’s cousin was Dr Gerhard Weiler, a leading German chemist who ran a Berlin forensics laboratory pioneering techniques in microscopic analysis.

Before Hitler came to power in 1933 and introduced laws banning Jews from many jobs, including scientific work, Dr Weiler analysed samples for police murder investigations and Berlin hospitals.

His wife Dr Grita Thoemke worked with him and was an expert in anaesthetics.

His father, Dr Julius Weiler, brother of the Bishop of Durham’s grandfather Bernard, had founded the Westend Sanatorium, a leading psychiatric centre.

The family lived in a villa in the clinic’s grounds filled with Louis XV furniture, French tapestries, bronzes by Andrea Riccio, and paintings by Old Masters including Francisco Goya, Francesco Guardi and Jan van Goyen.

Martha Weiler, wife of Max Weiler, taken in 1919 with her sisters Emma, left and Louise, right

Julius was one of six sons of a wealthy merchant, Herman Weiler, and Amalie Hermbach. The family had thrived under the enlightened laws of the Kingdom of Hanover and, in the bustling market town of Osterode am Harz, they ran “S.J Weiler”, a small department store, started by their grandfather, Simon.

Herman Weiler sent his sons to the local Latin school and, while his siblings went to work in the family store, Julius went to University in Gottingen and studied medicine, before moving to Berlin to practise as a doctor.

The Weiler family shop taken in the late 1800's

In 1884, following their father’s death, the Weilers sold the store and four of the brothers, Siegfried, Max, Ernest and the Bishop of Durham’s grandfather, Bernard, travelled to London and set up “Weiler Brothers”, importing “ostrich and osprey feathers.

Their mother Amalie, Bishop Welby’s great grandmother, also moved to London, living in a flat in Hampstead with her unmarried youngest son Ernest. She died of pneumonia in 1914 and was buried the Jewish cemetery in Golders Green.

Back in 1920s Germany, Gerhard and his wife Grita had opened Dr Weiler’s Diagnostic Institute. Documents in the Jewish Archive in Berlin show that the family had “renounced” the faith as long ago as 1905.

As a 15-year-old Gerhard had been confirmed, but their conversion to Christianity did not save the family from Hitler’s anti-Jewish laws.

As Gerhard wrote later in his self-published memoirs: “We heard Hitler on the radio, screaming and ranting that the blame for all German ills lay with the Jews.

“It was the Jews’ fault entirely that Germany had lost the war...The Jews were also responsible for Germany’s supposed moral decline. There must only be one course of action to be taken: the Jews must be exterminated like vermin.”

The Weilers’ laboratory was in the basement of a large German villa which they rented to another family.

One of their staff, who cleaned the laboratory, was Communist. Working upstairs was a manservant who turned out to be a Nazi sympathiser.

When Hitler came to power in 1933 the manservant informed on the laboratory cleaner. He was imprisoned and executed.

“Adolf Hitler became Chancellor and the Reichstag (the German parliament) went up in flames’, wrote Gerhard. 'When we heard the news...Grita and I both agreed that we must leave the country’.

Offered a job at a laboratory at Oxford University, Gerhard headed to England and stayed with his uncle Siegfried, the last surviving Weiler brother who had set out from Germany in 1890.

“I stayed with my uncle in his luxurious flat, complete with cook, maid footman and chauffeur...(his) chauffeur drove me to Bedford College in a huge Humber limousine, where I was given a warm reception.

"I left in high spirits with the comforting thought that Adolf Hitler and his Third Reich would never harm either me or my family.”

But, travelling back to Germany to arrange their departure, he had a narrow escape at the border. Secretly carrying cigarettes in his fur coat, he was stopped by a Nazi official but claimed he had nothing to declare.

“Miraculously, they didn’t discover the cigarettes in the lining, otherwise I would probably not be here to tell the tale!”

The whole family, Gerhard, his wife Grita, her sister Kaete, a ballerina, and his father, Julius, left Germany. When war broke out, Gerhard was registered as an “enemy alien” under laws designed to stop Nazi spies and spent several months in an internment camp near Liverpool.

“All exits were guarded by soldiers with bayonets,” he recalled and several Jewish inmates committed suicide.

After the war he lived in Oxford, where he ran a private forensic laboratory, and did not return to Germany for 31 years. Grita died in 1983 and Gerhard in 1995.

He left much of his art collection, including a series of Renaissance drawings, to Oxford’s Ashmolean Museum and a language prize, funded by a bequest, which bears his name at Roehampton University.

The Hanovarian town of Osterode am Harz where Justin Welby's forebares can be traced back to

Other members of the Weiler family, however, did not survive. The Holocaust records at Yad Vashem in Israel record the death of a young boy, Nathan Sommer, from Kassel, close to the Weilers’ hometown of Osterode am Harz. His mother was Gertrud Weiler, in all probability a cousin of the nearby merchant family.

A picture in the memorial archive shows a tiny boy holding a dog and clutching his sister’s arm.

Nathan, who was born in 1934, was “murdered” on an unknown date after being transported by the SS to the Riga ghetto, in Latvia, where most of the 24,000 Jewish inhabitants were massacred in late 1941.

Meanwhile, the Bishop of Durham’s father, Gavin, returned to London from New York after the war and established “Gavin Distillers”, based in Oxford Street. He exported whisky to America and even had his own blend, “Gavin’s Gold Label”.

As a 19-year-old Alison Wilkinson, then Cowie, began working for Welby as his personal, business and social secretary shortly after he had stood unsuccessfully as a Conservative candidate in the 1951 election.

Gavin Welby

Mr Welby had a reputation as a ladies’ man. Briefly married before the war to factory owner’s daughter, Doris Sturzenegger — a fact which he later kept secret from his son — his second wife, Jane Portal, who is Bishop Welby’s mother, divorced him on the grounds of adultery. He also had affairs with actress Vanessa Redgrave and President Kennedy’s sister, Pat.

“I remember one time he had got this great stack of letters from a girlfriend and he said he wanted me to just tear them all up and throw them all away,’ recalls Mrs Wilkinson. 'There were girlfriends in the background but I never met any of them or knew who they were’.

Gavin Welby, who died in 1977, took many of his secrets to his grave, and his son desperately wants to know whether, unbeknown to him, he has a half-bother or half-sister.

However, The Telegraph has learnt that there were no children from his short-lived 1934 marriage to Miss Sturzenegger.

She later re-married, to Alfred Henry, a corporate accounting executive, and the couple moved to Los Angeles, where they had two children, but the family confirmed her first marriage was childless.

Archbishop

2012-11-27T08:13:00.002+00:00

The Archbishop’s father, his secret wife, an affair with a Kennedy and defaming a Labour Cabinet Minister

The new Archbishop of Canterbury's father, Gavin Welby, was a man of mystery, with a flair for reinvention and a story to rival that of the Great Gatsby.

Gavin Welby, left, and Bishop Welby Photo: REUTERS

By Jason Lewis, Investigations Editor

8:00AM GMT 25 Nov 2012

GAVIN WELBY was a man of mystery, with a flair for reinvention and a story to rival that of the Great Gatsby.

He worked his way into the upper echelons of society on both sides of the Atlantic, using a series of adopted personas. But when he died of a heart attack in 1977, alone in a flat in Kensington, his only son - the person closest to him at the end of his life - did not even know his real name or birth date.

Justin Welby, the future Archbishop of Canterbury, was only 21 at the time and studying law and history at Trinity College, Cambridge. He knew his father as an erratic and alcohol-dependent but "really, really brilliant" man who had lived an extraordinary life. But the details were unclear.

"I lived with him, but I didn't know him very well," he said yesterday. Summoned down to London to complete the formalities after the death, the heartbroken son recorded the name of his father as Gavin Bramhal Welby, born on November 28, 1914. Neither detail was correct.

The mistake was understandable, as Mr Welby Sr had hidden his identity many times. A chancer, draft dodger and adulterer, he had been sued for libel by a Cabinet minister. There was even a secret first wife that he never spoke of. But he had carefully constructed a respectable persona which allowed him to survive and to flourish, and without which his son would not have had a public school education or possibly a chance of high office.

Gavin Welby claimed a connection to the aristocratic Welbys of Lincolnshire and in particular Sir Charles Welby, the fifth baronet. He also suggested that his family owned a Scottish distillery.

These untruths helped him befriend John F Kennedy in America, becoming so close that he even dated the future president's sister Pat.

In this country, he won over senior members of the Conservative Party and the family of the deputy prime minister, Rab Butler. He married Butler's favourite niece, Jane Portal, who had been Winston Churchill's personal secretary and who would become Justin's mother.

His powerful connections helped him towards a career in politics and two failed attempts to win a seat in the House of Commons. Gavin Welbyearned enough money to send his son to Eton - although perhaps not enough for Justin to pay his way on a daily basis, leaving him the poorest child in a school house that included two Rothschilds.

The present Bishop of Durham said: "He moved quite often. I know I didn't have much money, but I don't ever remember thinking everyone else has got so much more. It was clear other people were wealthier than we were. I probably was at the bottom end. But you know, school is school, you just get on with life."

Whatever else he did in his life, Gavin Welby tried to give his son a good start. His care was returned towards the end, with the alcoholic and unwell father nursed by a loving teenage son. The Sunday Telegraph was able to share remarkable new details with Bishop Welby about the life of a man who was actually born Bernard Gavin Weiler on November 28, 1910, in Ruislip, on the outskirts of west London.

His father was a "Hebrew" German émigré also called Bernard Weiler, who had moved to Britain from Germany some 20 years earlier. Mr Weiler Sr had an elder brother called Herrman who had refused call-up papers for the army and had been stripped of German citizenship.

Much later the synagogue in the village where they came from would be burnt to the ground by the SS, and Jews sent to Nazi death camps. Several people called Weiler from the area appear on the list of victims of the Holocaust. The senior Bernard Weiler became a successful ostrich feather merchant with premises in the Barbican and in Cape Town, South Africa. He lived in a large house with his Englishborn wife Edith, who was two decades younger, as well as a cook, a maid and a nurse for the children.

But the family fortunes were hit by the First World War in 1914, and the so-called "feather crash" which saw changing fashions kill off the demand for expensive feather-adorned garments and hats.

Anti-German sentiment was strong, so the family name was changed by deed poll to Welby and Gavin's father took an agency job selling worthless "snake oil" drugs on sales trips to America. He sold an art collection, but in spite of failing health he was forced to continue making week-long voyages across the Atlantic, cramped in steerage.

Gavin took over this dubious business shortly before his father died. He was 19. As he began to spend increasing amounts of time in New York, the young man set about reinventing himself. This part of the story did enter family history and Bishop Welby said recently that he believed his father had been a bootlegger during the Prohibition era.

"I remember my father telling me [his mother] gave him £5 and put him on a boat. He said he went to New York in 1929 and traded whisky. When I was studying history, the penny dropped that Prohibition ended in 1933 ... so he was bootlegging. He was illegally trading whisky." After being told on Friday of the details of his father's life, Bishop Welby said: "He would tell me how he ran alcohol with his 'Italian friends' as he liked to call them. But he kept so much to himself."

When Prohibition ended, the inventive young man - now calling himself Gavin Bramhall James Welby - was the New York import manager for the National Distillers Production Corporation.

His job was to supply Manhattan's newly booming hotels and cocktail bars with the ingredients for their latest frozen, shaken and stirred alcoholic creations. Aged 23, with a clipped English accent, and dark, debonair good looks, he modelled himself on the Hollywood star Cary Grant. Gavin Welbyquickly became the man to know if you wanted to hold a party in one of Manhat-tan's upmarket hotels. He arranged balls for the sons and debutante daughters of New York's wealthy élite, befriending businessmen and their wives. By 1940 he was earning $7,000 (£4,300) a year, the equivalent of $116,000 (£72,000) today, and had rooms at the five-star Hotel Pierre overlooking Central Park. He could also afford to rent an apartment on the Upper East Side, where he held parties for high society.

Rather than admit to being a mere employee, Welby began hinting that his family owned one of the distilleries supplying the liquor.

The society columns of The New York Times from this period are filled with his exploits. They also reveal details of Welby's first marriage: to Doris Sturzenegger, the daughter of a wealthy factory owner, in January 1934.

Hailing from Chester, New Jersey, she was of German descent just like her new husband. "Doe" as she was known had been a student at Boston University, whose yearbook for 1930 says: "Effervescent, always with a smile, Doe's a cheerful girl, sans guile."

The marriage appears to have been very short lived. Before the year was out, she had left him. After returning first to Boston, she used her maiden name and a newlyminted American passport to sail to Britain, identifying herself as a dance teacher. There is no trace of the couple getting divorced.

After the outbreak of war in 1939, Welby remained in New York, organising parties. But when America entered the conflict he had no choice but to join up, either there or at home. In December 1942, he held a farewell party to mark his departure.

The New York Times reported: "Several hundred persons, including many prominent English men and women living here, attended a farewell reception given in the small ballroom of the Pierre by Gavin Welby, son of Mrs E James Welby of London and Surrey, who is about to join the British Army as a commissioned officer."

He received a field promotion to First Lieutenant in the Royal Army Service Corps, in charge of transport and supplies. However, when demobbed three years after the end of the war, he placed an announcement in The Times as "Captain" Gavin Welby, announcing that he would now be taking up residence at the Ritz Carlton Hotel in New York.

He also applied to Conservative Central Office, asking to be considered as a candidate for Parliament. His application forms to the party are sealed, but it is understood that he gave false details about his background, shaved several years off his age and overstated his position with the American firms that had employed him before the war.

Nevertheless, his easy manner and direct-speaking style apparently impressed the Conservative hierarchy. In 1950, he was selected to fight for Coventry East against an up-and-coming politician, Richard Crossman, who was later to become a Labour Cabinet minister.

The local Conservative party activists seem to have taken against their candidate, who continued to be based in London. A report to the constituency in January 1951 complained: "Adopted last October (Welby) has made a few visits to the Constituency, but has by no means got around the Division. I should say that he is not particularly well suited to this type of Division."

The Coventry Telegraph reported that he was heckled at the hustings. During one debate, Welby referred to the Stone Age, saying: "It was not uncommon for a man to beat his wife with a cudgel." Someone shouted: "That's private enterprise!" His brief visits to Coventry were dubbed "jetpropelled canvassing" as he took to driving around the constituency in a car with a loudspeaker, accompanied by his mother. It was reported that she had delayed an operation to join him.

Days before the poll, disaster struck. The Welby campaign team published a pamphlet entitled "Good Advice" which misquoted his opponent as saying: "Labour is not fit to govern the country ...". Crossman sued and Welby was forced to publish a grovelling apology on the eve of the election.

He had apparently approved the pamphlet but now accused his election agent of inserting the quote "entirely on your own initiative".

Crossman won a massive majority and Welby headed back across the Atlantic. Then in 1952 Walter Winchell, the king of American gossip columnists, revealed that the Englishman was dating the daughter of Joseph Kennedy, former US ambassador to Britain. Patricia was also the sister of John F Kennedy.

Alongside snippets on the love affair between Frank Sinatra and Ava Gardner, the columnist wrote: "JP Kennedy's daughter Pat and Gavin Welby (of the Scotch whisky clan) are intoxicated about each other." However, Patricia later married the British actor Peter Lawford. Welby returned to Britain.

During the election campaign he had met and befriended Adam Butler, the son of Rab, who would go on to be an MP, a minister and aide to Margaret Thatcher and a knight. They became so close that Welby later added a clause to his will, making Adam Butler the legal guardian of his son. He added: "I express the wish that (he) take my son to live with him ... during his infancy."

It was Adam Butler who introduced Gavin Welby to his cousin Jane Portal, the private secretary to Winston Churchill. She later said that she had been hired by Churchill as a "donkey" and "dogsbody" to do late night work, as well as taking dictation of his war memoirs. Being a niece of Rab Butler had helped her get the job. After meeting her in 1940, Churchill had said: "You'll do."

She went on to work for Churchill as he led a government after the war, helping to keep his stroke and failing health hidden from the wider world.

Gavin Welby and Jane Portal married on Monday, April 4, 1955, in Baltimore, Maryland, without their family and friends in attendance. They had apparently eloped because of disapproval from her parents. Later that month, however, the marriage was announced in The Times. A reception was held at 11Downing Street, arranged by Rab Butler.

When details of the wedding reached America, John F Kennedy wrote to his 21-yearold Swedish mistress Gunilla von Post: "Did you see in the paper that our friend — the cold, frozen Mr Gavin Welby — got married to Mr Churchill's secretary? Something must have happened."

By 1956, the Welbys were living in Onslow Square, Chelsea. Gavin had invested much of the money he had made in America and was now a Name on the Lloyds insurance market. His son was born on January 6 that year.

Justin Portal Welby was christened at Holy Trinity, Brompton, with Adam Butler and the Hon Flora Fraser, now Lady Saltoun, acting as godparents. This was the same church to which he would return for comfort after the death of his first child in a car accident in Paris, and where he first felt called to the ministry.

The marriage between his parents did not last. Within three years, Jane Welby petitioned for divorce on the grounds that her husband was "guilty of adultery". Mr Welby did not contest the claim. The divorce was finalised in February 1959. Jane Portal went on to marry Charles Williams, the former Essex county cricketer and oil executive, in 1975. When he was elevated to the House of Lords as a life peer in 1985, she became Lady Williams of Elvel.

After the marriage ended, Gavin Welby went back to dividing his time between Britain and America. He stood for Parliament again in 1955, as a last-minute replacement candidate in Goole, Yorkshire.

The local party chairman wrote: "His qualifications seem so astonishingly good ... [we] are extraordinary lucky [to have] a man of such calibre."

But Mr Welby lost again, badly.

His next notable romantic involvement was in the early Sixties, with the 23-year-old actress Vanessa Redgrave, a rising star of the Royal Shakespeare Company. Welby was now 50, but claimed to be younger.

"I have something very special to tell you," Miss Redgrave wrote to her father. "I am going to marry a sweet, darling man called Gavin Welby."

Her father, Sir Michael Redgrave, did not approve. Her mother, Rachel Kempson, wrote to him: "Vanessa is completely infatuated ... I only pray we can prevent marriage." They feared Welby was a "rotten piece of work".

The actress did eventually end the relationship. She told her father: "I have decided not to marry Gavin because, although I do love him, for various reasons I know it wouldn't work ... I had a talk with Mum this evening and realised that it is the only thing to do."

So much of this astonishing life was hidden from his son, who was moved by the story The Sunday Telegraph was able to share with him.

Bishop Welby did not know, for example, that his father had Jewish ancestry, or an older sister called Peggy.

She married a future Labour MP, the communist sympathiser Lester Hutchinson who was expelled from the party in 1949, and she died in 1983. Bishop Welby continues to wonder whether he has secret brothers or sisters.

"In many ways, I think the story you have told me brings more credit on him than the story he himself told," Bishop Welby said.

"It is the 'making good' story isn't it? It's a great thing of overcoming setbacks. I would have thought 'wow, that's a fantastic story' if he had told me about it when I was a child."

He went on: "There is no hiding the fact that he was a complicated man. He was really, really, brilliant. I think what you have said shows he was really brilliant in many ways. But there were, probably from his background, complications in his life that hindered that brilliance really being deployed fully."

Archbishop

2012-11-27T08:02:00.003+00:00

Justin Welby: Secret life of my 'alcohol-dependent' father

The next Archbishop of Canterbury has described his shock at discovering the truth about his father’s secret life.

Gavin Welby, left, and Bishop Welby Photo: REUTERS

By Jason Lewis, Investigations Editor

11:00PM GMT 24 Nov 2012

In his first interview since becoming the incoming leader of the Anglican Church, Bishop Justin Welby revealed the struggles he had faced as a teenager at Eton, nursing his alcohol-dependant father whose behaviour had become increasingly erratic.

Since the age of three, Justin had been brought up alone by his businessman father, Gavin Welby, a divorcee. But he had no idea of his father’s remarkable life story, which The Sunday Telegraph has pieced together for the first time.

We were able to inform him that his father had disguised his real name and German-Jewish roots, and invented an aristocratic English persona in America, where he earned riches in the drinks industry and organising debutante balls.

He had married in America, but kept it a secret all his life, had an affair with the sister of John F Kennedy and later dated the actress Vanessa Redgrave.

He stood for Parliament as a Conservative candidate, but was sued for libel by his Labour opponent, Richard Crossman. His sister, whose identity he never disclosed, married a Labour MP who had been a Communist.

“I think it is quite a remarkable story,” said the Rt Rev Justin Welby, the Bishop of Durham. “I would have thought 'wow, that’s a fantastic story’ if he had told me about it as a child.”

At the end of a tumultuous week for the next Archbishop of Canterbury, our disclosures prompted him to speak for the first time of his experiences coping with his father’s dependency on alcohol and to give an insight into how they helped shape his own faith.

“It wasn’t an easy upbringing. Living with someone who’s got an alcohol dependency is complicated, to put it at its mildest,” said Bishop Welby. “He was very affectionate, brilliant intellectually but quite demanding.”

The bishop was 21 years old, studying at Trinity College, Cambridge, when his father died of a heart attack in 1977. The Sunday Telegraph has learned that the name and date of birth given at his time of death were both wrong.

“I lived with him but I didn’t know him very well,” said Bishop Welby. “He told lots of stories but one was never really sure what was true and what wasn’t. He drank quite heavily and, you know, he would say things sometimes when he had been drinking and you did not know what was true or not.”

He said he and his family had been trying to piece the story together for years, without great success. He is desperate to know whether, unbeknown to him, he may have a half-sister or half-brother.

Bishop Welby’s mother was Jane Portal, a former personal secretary to Winston Churchill, but his father had been previously married in America to Doris Sturzenegger, a factory owner’s daughter.

Bishop Welby said: “I didn’t know about his [first] marriage.”

He asked: “You’re sure he had no other children? The reason I ask is, there were two things he said to me at one point. He had been drinking very heavily. He was right near the end of his life, and he said: 'I am very glad that I’ve got other children.’ He also said, 'I am very glad …’ something else, I don’t want to say what.

“The other thing turned out to be true, but I didn’t find that out until 20 years after his death. That has always made me wonder whether he genuinely had other children and that both statements were true.”

His father was born Bernard Gavin Weiler, the son of a Jewish immigrant from Germany, though he never told his son he had any Jewish ancestry.

“He wouldn’t talk about his family at all,” said Bishop Welby, though he did admit to his son that he had first made money bootlegging whisky alongside the Italian Mafia in America during the prohibition years. He later “went legit” running the New York concession for a major drinks firm supplying leading Manhattan hotels.

Bishop Welby said: “He would tell me how he ran alcohol with his 'Italian friends’, as he liked to call them. But he kept so much to himself. He was a great keeper of secrets.

“I think he told people the stories that he wanted them to believe and kept the rest quietly to himself.”

Our investigation has pieced together the life of a man who reinvented himself many times, here and in America, and was so successful at it that he earned enough to send his son to Eton. After being told the details, Bishop Welby said his admiration for his father as a survivor had increased.

“I think in many ways, the story you have told me brings more credit on him than the story he himself told. It is the sort of 'making good’ story isn’t it? It’s a great thing of overcoming setbacks,” he said.

“When he died, I remember feeling a deep sense of waste really. He was very good company, very sociable. He was a great raconteur.”

When told that his father had an elder sister, Peggy, born a year before him, Bishop Welby said: “He had a sister? I heard rumours of a sister. Good gracious. There were rumours of a sister whom he had fallen out with.”

Emotional at learning so much about his father, Bishop Welby added: “I feel wistful. It is the sort of thing that one would have loved to have known. To have heard from him.

“There is no hiding the fact that he was a complicated man. He was really, really brilliant. But there were, probably from his background, complications in his life that hindered that brilliance really being deployed fully.”

Savile

2012-11-05T11:13:00.003+00:00

Jimmy Savile gave job to chief porter who had keys to the wards

Key details of how Jimmy Savile was able to gain access to NHS wards, where he abused patients, can be disclosed today.

Savile was first invited into the Leeds hospital by its chief porter, who went on to become a paid employee of the disc jockey Photo: REX

By Jason Lewis, and Claire Duffin9:02AM GMT 04 Nov 2012
Savile used his fame for decades to cover up his activities at three hospitals – Leeds General Infirmary, Stoke Mandeville and Broadmoor.

Until now it has been unclear how he came to be given rooms and keys without questions being asked.

The Telegraph can disclose that Savile was first invited into the Leeds hospital by its chief porter, who went on to become a paid employee of the disc jockey while still working at the hospital.

And his involvement at Broadmoor was rubber-stamped in 1974 by Dr David Owen, now Lord Owen, who was health minister, government papers in the National Archives disclose.

Savile had accommodation at all three hospitals and came to be in charge of Broadmoor for a period in the 1980s when he was put in charge of a task force to run the secure hospital.

Ministers have ordered inquiries into how the NHS came to allow him such access, but key details have now been uncovered that cast new light on his activities.

He was first involved in Leeds General Infirmary in 1961 when he was asked by its chief porter, Charles Hullighan, to help its new hospital radio station, and promptly volunteered as a porter.

TV Appearance: Charles Hullighan with Savile

Savile had already been questioned by police over allegations of having sex with under-age girls at dance halls he ran across the north, and had become a pirate radio disc jockey. Before he died in 1995, Mr Hullighan said: "James came to the infirmary as a volunteer porter for a few days in 1961 and he stayed for a long time. He was always available to help.

"Jimmy gave great pleasure to so many patients, and adding the many touches of humour that is so natural to his character."

Mr Hullighan became an extremely close friend of the DJ, to the extent that in 1972 he was made company secretary of the firm that dealt with Savile's earnings, despite having no business background.

It is not known whether he told hospital authorities of the business relationship, but Savile paid him a salary and contributions towards a pension, and Mr Hullighan was able to have homes in Leeds and Scarborough.

Exactly what Mr Hullighan earned is not disclosed, but in 1981, when Savile was at the height of his fame, he shared in directors' pay of £91,500, the equivalent of about £310,000 today.

Last week Mr Hullighan's widow, Beryl, declined to discuss Savile or her husband's involvement.

It can also be disclosed that the disgraced star's unrestricted role at Broadmoor secure hospital, where allegedly he sexually abused vulnerable patients, was approved by ministers at the time.

A Whitehall report signed off by Lord Owen revealed his appointment as honorary entertainments officer.

The confidential hospital advisory service report was sent to ministers in February 1974 and recommended that some patients at the secure hospital be allowed conjugal visits, supervised shopping trips, mixed wards where patients due for release could adjust to a more normal social life and "halfway house" hostels in the community.

The report by civil servants, found in the National Archives, has a section on the BBC star that says: "We were pleased to meet Jimmy Savile for a discussion of his work as Honorary Assistant Entertainments Officer."

Savile used the title and was given an office in the grounds of the hospital, a bedroom, which he called his "cell", and his own set of keys to the wards.

The report, which also went to Barbara Castle, then health secretary, outlined how Savile had raised money for a minibus for patients' families and disco equipment, and said: "Apart from the undoubted pleasure the hospital gains from having him around… he has pioneered outings for patients and has overcome opposition from outside and inside the hospital to these ventures.

"His energy, enthusiasm, sincerity and devotion to Broadmoor and its patients and staff are infectious and he performs the function of an unofficial but very successful public-relations officer outside the hospital, which can only be of great benefit for Broadmoor as a whole."

According to the surviving papers, neither Lord Owen nor officials raised any questions or passed any comment about Savile's role.

The Department of Health is now investigating the background to his appointment in 1988 as head of a task force overseeing the hospital.