The former deputy Labour leader of Preston has been given legal aid to sue the Inland Revenue, two chief constables, two former Tory government ministers, two millionaires and a former fish and chip shop owner, for conspiring to steal his tax records.
Frank McGrath was swept out of power in a Labour Party purge after the town hall and the homes of councillors had been unlawfully raided in an abortive police operation known as Operation Angel, said to have cost about £25 million. Lancashire commerce branch detectives trawled the financial affairs of politicians who were friendly with the now-jailed ‘socialist’ tycoon, Owen Oyston, but no councillor or council official has yet been convicted of any offence under Operation Angel.
Councillor Frank McGrath, a millionaire in 1987, from investments in Oyston radio stations, was charged with defrauding the Midland Bank of £1.89 million. Two years later, a judge dismissed all the charges against him. But like Kevin Taylor in the Stalker case, the long and expensive bank fraud case had knocked him out of public life during the years before his acquittal.
PII
In the early stages of the case, McGrath and his defence team were excluded from court to permit an ex parte application from the Crown in which Michael Shorrock, QC, persuaded Judge Denis Clark to give public interest immunity protection to a number of ‘sensitive’ police documents so that they would not be disclosed to McGrath. Document D909 on the PII list was described as ‘Merseyside Police file re McGrath’. But within a few weeks, witless or mischievous Crown Prosecution Service clerks sent McGrath’s solicitor just what the judge had not ordered – a complete court transcript of the ex parte PII hearing.
As soon as McGrath read this transcript he perceived that back in the days of Margaret Thatcher, his political opponents had been studying his income tax returns. The transcript showed how prosecutor Shorrock explained D909 to the judge:
‘It is old. It has nothing to do with the matters under investigation in this case. It is a sort of money profile of Mr McGrath. It is clear that this information is gathered by the Merseyside police by accessing the Inland Revenue… which, I suspect, is a source which the Merseyside police certainly would not want disclosed. Because if one looks at it, it looks as though they looked at his tax records and his tax returns, and letters he had written to the Revenue.’
The judge announced:
‘D909 is a money profile. I will not tell you from whom the information was garnered but it is in the public interest not to disclose from whom they obtained the information.’
But when the transcript fell into McGrath’s hands, the Crown’s junior counsel, Anthony Russell, had to write to the defence, on January 27, 1994, and reveal that the judge had been seriously misled. D909 had not come from the Inland Revenue at all.
‘They told us the Inland Revenue information had been obtained from a third party, known to the police and not to the Inland Revenue,’ McGrath recounted recently. ‘On November 23, 1995, I received a five page document, anonymously through the post, which I believe to be D909, or part of D909. A careful reading of the document demonstrates that they have had access to my Inland Revenue files. The final sentence of page five suggests that someone has been paid for obtaining this information. I am in no doubt that a person unlawfully obtained my tax records from the Inland Revenue and is guilty of theft and offences under the Official Secrets Act. I was already aware of the activities of Michael Murrin, a private investigator who was employed and financed by prominent Conservative politicians, including the MPs Sir Peter, now Lord, Blaker and Robert Atkins, now Sir Robert Atkins. Michael Murrin recorded his telephone conversations and following a compromise in a civil action brought by Owen Oyston against Michael Murrin, these tapes were made available to Owen Oyston.’
An action for damages
McGrath’s legal aid certificate specifies ‘an action for damages for conspiracy to injure’ against the chief constable of Lancashire, the chief constable of Merseyside, Lord Blaker, Sir Robert Atkins, Michael Murrin [once owner of the Longridge, Lancs, fish and chip shop], William Harrison [a Blackpool millionaire builder who had Mrs Thatcher to stay at his home during Tory conferences] and Christopher More [a millionaire private eye, based in Lymm, Cheshire, named last year in New York as a defendant with Lady Grantchester in the Littlewoods Organisation racketeering case].
In the early nineties, Private Eye magazine revealed that Bill Harrison and Lord Blaker had paid at least £30,000 to fund Murrin and More’s investigations into the affairs of Owen Oyston, Frank McGrath and the Labour leader of Preston, Harold Parker.
McGrath said,
‘The Inland Revenue have confirmed to me that they have never produced any information concerning my affairs to any police force. I allege that the tax records were obtained unlawfully and that both the Merseyside and Lancashire police forces must have been aware of this.’
Owen Oyston claims that his 140 tape recordings of Murrin’s damaging conversations are ‘safely under lock and key’. But unfortunately for McGrath, Owen Oyston is also under lock and key, at HM Prison Wealstun, serving six years for the rape and indecent assault of a young model.
In February 1995, three weeks before Oyston’s own conspiracy action against Atkins, Blaker, Harrison and Murrin was due into court, Greater Manchester police called at Oyston’s home and arrested him for rape. At his third trial in Liverpool he failed to persuade the jury that he had been the target of a Tory plot.
Detective Superintendent Bill Roberts, asked on oath if he knew Murrin was sending information on Oyston to Lancashire police at the time Roberts took the decision to arrest the tycoon, replied, ‘I only found out afterwards.’
Oyston was in jail by the time the rather unpredictable Murrin had handed over a second batch of tapes to the Oyston lawyers. Now McGrath says he may have to sue Oyston to get access to the tapes.
A test case?
Britain celebrates 200 years of income tax in December this year. The D909 case might serve as an historical test case. If it gets to court, we might discover whether the secrecy of Inland Revenue, promised by William Pitt and guarded by the Official Secrets Acts of his twentieth century successors, collapsed under Margaret Thatcher.