From April to late June 1992, I spent some three months in a Dutch refugee camp, OC Zeewolde. I had applied for political asylum. The Dutch authorities had agreed immediately, to fully process the application. I gave them no reason for my application. The Bosnian war was beginning and the Dutch reception centres for refugees were bursting at the seams and more refugees was crowding over the Dutch/German border each day.
I was using a recent loophole in Dutch administrative law to try and force the release of information I believed the Dutch held concerning me. I believed that money had been laundered in my name through Dutch bank accounts by the late Dennis Robertson, my ex-wife’s accountant; and that he laundered funds for SIS, the British intelligence service.
The core of the application process was an official interview conducted by the Ministry of Justice. The Ministry would then make a decision based on the interview and grant the applicant either asylum status (or, more usually, special leave to remain in the country) or serve them with a deportation order. My lawyer suddenly found pressing business elsewhere and then resigned from the case. The Dutch appointed another lawyer, Eli Lucas, to represent me. She informed me that I had left England ahead of the police in order to avoid arrest, after being involved in major fraud; and that I had lodged the asylum application to avoid the extradition process the British authorities were about to initiate. I told her I had no idea what she was talking about – although I was beginning to get some idea – and instructed her to lodge an interlocutory injunction against my imminent deportation on the grounds of my EC citizenship. She agreed to do this, stating that she had originally confused me with another client, also English. A few days later, I was informed through the Dutch that some £800,000 had gone through a Dutch bank account (or accounts) in my name between 1987 and 1989. Given that I had been an unemployed graduate student at the time, and in conjunction with information they received from London which they assumed to be accurate, the Dutch made the not unnatural assumption that I had been involved with the laundering of funds from drug deals or the activities of Northern Irish paramilitaries – or both. The British authorities were apparently confirming this.
After other refugees had been told versions of this by some of the camp officials, and so that my lawyer, Eli Lucas, could mount a defence against deportation, I informed both my lawyer and the Dutch authorities that I believed the money had been laundered by Dennis Robertson, my ex-wife’s accountant, and that he laundered funds for SIS. The shit – rather immediately – hit the fan. My ex-wife, Pat, had previously been married to Thomas Legg (now Sir Thomas), recently in charge of the Sandline Inquiry. Dennis Robertson had been their accountant, and continued to be Pat’s accountant after we were married.
I had spent a lot of time on previous trips to Holland trying to trace these accounts which I believed Robertson had placed in my name illegally after Pat and I divorced in 1985. I thought an asylum application would bring them to the surface. The Dutch had now confirmed their existence, together with the amounts involved and the approximate dates. They didn’t give me the account numbers. They had known about these accounts since my application: it was why they agreed to process it. The Dutch had assumed they could deport me at any time on those grounds. They now had a problem. Both the existence and numbers of the accounts would have to be confirmed at my deportation hearing. Without that evidence, they had no legal grounds for deportation; with it I would have largely confirmed my account of Robertson’s role.
The first attempted frame
The Dutch came up with a few stratagems to make life uncomfortable for me, of which the least entertaining was the one involving an English passport which suddenly fell into the hands of Abdul, a penniless Sudanese refugee, with whom I shared a bungalow. He’d arrived home one night with the improbable story that a black Englishman had given him the passport in a local club as surety for a loan to buy some petrol so as to get back to Amsterdam – eighty miles away – where he lived. Abdul asked me to verify its authenticity. It was authentic enough, issued in the name of Philip (Adrian) Morris, born in the mid-fifties in Luton. The passport was about six years old and the entries in it consisted mostly of stamps for journeys every six months or so between Amsterdam and Karachi airports – as fans of Howard Marks will know, the world’s most popular dope run. Having handled it, my fingerprints were all over the thing. In front of some witnesses, I told Abdul that if he was messing around with British intelligence they’d possibly dump him in the lake after finishing with him. He thought about this for a while before telling what had really happened. He said that he’d been cultivated by a black Englishman with a woman friend, an Iranian who spoke Arabic as well as Farsi, for the last month. They’d picked him up in one of the local bars and taken him back occasionally to a flat they’d rented in Zeewolde, the local village, some ten miles away. (This was confirmed by one of his friends.) They’d offered Abdul ‘help’ with his application for refugee status and asked him to show the passport to his interesting new English friend, me. Before giving it back to them, Abdul would then have testified that I’d asked him to steal it.
A deal is offered
The Dutch authorities now offered me a deal. Instead of enforcing my deportation, I would be allowed to live and work in Holland, but never with full residential status. At the end of three months, I was to spend a week or so in Belgium before returning to Holland. If I refused this, they would deport me to Britain; and if I ever attempted to claim full residential rights, they would also deport me immediately to Britain. There were two apparent points here. First, the denial of full residence would in practice stop me obtaining any information under the Dutch freedom of information laws they had come up with. I was pretty certain that this concerned the bank accounts, and that Robertson’s name would be associated with them. I also believed that there had been joint bank accounts administered by Robertson between 1983 and 1987 in both my name and that of my ex-wife Pat; and that these had gone from the Nat West in Jersey to Holland. Secondly, Gerald Bull and Andre Cools had been killed in Belgium in the previous two years. I was sure that my spending some time in Belgium was a British idea. Either way, I wouldn’t win. I said that I would agree to a deportation to Germany, where I had friends. This they refused, saying that it was either Belgium or Britain, and that I would find a return to Britain unpleasant. I took them to mean that I might be tried for tax evasion on the evidence of the accounts in my name which had been used for money-laundering.
After Eli Lucas had cancelled my listed hearing against deportation against my instructions, I tried to contact another lawyer. I insisted to the Dutch that I had the right of residence as an EC citizen. I’d managed to get a job but the Dutch refused me my passport so I couldn’t start it. After a confrontation with a Dutch official, Jo van Loo, at which I restated my belief that Robertson had laundered SIS funds in my name and explained why I had no intention of going to Belgium, I was immediately arrested and deported.
Deportation
Concerning the deportation, the legal situation was a (relatively) simple one. Community nationals had a right of residence which derived directly from the Treaty and was
‘…in no way subject to the issue by the national authorities of a residence permit, the function of which is merely to certify the existence of an already existing right and cannot be regarded as creating any such right.'(1)
The only exceptions to this direct and personal right (droit subjectif) were under the ordre public provisions, subsumed in Article 3 of Directive 64/221, whose provisions placed strict limits on deportations and the procedures concerning them. Thus, deportation may not occur for reasons of a general preventive nature, an exclusion must be ‘based exclusively on the individual conduct of the person concerned'(2); this conduct, in addition to being a ‘genuine and sufficiently serious’ threat to public policy, must also affect ‘one of the fundamental interests of society’.(3) Royer also established that rights under the Treaty
‘…would become illusory if the Member State could, by the immediate execution of a decision ordering expulsion, deprive the person concerned of the opportunity of effectively making use of the remedies which he is guaranteed by Directive 64/221.’
That is, domestic due process had to be observed. The only possible legal ground for the expulsion without appeal which was effected would have been under the security provisos, and then only in a case of ‘properly established urgency.(4) None of the above could be justifiably applied to my expulsion. Hence, the silence of the Dutch authorities on the matter. Except on security grounds, the expulsion was unlawful.
Directive 64/221 has been held in past judgements to have ‘direct effect’ and thus to have the de facto status of a Regulation. If a Regulation was breached, I believe the case was directly contestable in a Dutch court because of the principle of direct effect; and, failing this, there was a possible case under the Francovich ruling which made member States liable not just for acts which breach Community law but also for their omissions. In effect, a duty of care was placed on member States.
I put most of this to the Dutch authorities before they deported me, so the expulsion was not a casual one. Given the above legal outline, it had to be on grounds both of national importance and extreme urgency. It was. The Dutch authorities had no intention of letting me expose an SIS laundering racket in one of their courts. Neither had the British. Upon my return to England, I contacted my local MP, Roger Stott, and asked him to obtain from the Dutch Consul the reasons for my deportation, and the circumstances surrounding it. They stalled for twelve months before forwarding an account claiming that I had been extradited. Most of the other information they gave was also untrue, including the dates. Extradition has a clear single meaning: the return of a fugitive offender to face serious criminal charges at the hands of the receiving authority. After another year or so the Dutch forwarded another account to my MEP, Terry Wynn. This account claimed that the use of the term ‘extradition’ had been a linguistic error. This was extracted from the Dutch Ministry of Justice only after my MP had obtained a statement from David McClean of the Home Office that my name didn’t appear on any extradition record. The Dutch are pretty much bilingual with regards to English and deal regularly with extradition requests. The ‘mistake’ claim was simple flapdoodle. In this second account they still refused to give a reason for the deportation, citing the order to leave Holland I had received after the official interview: that Holland was a crowded country, etc. I’ve failed to find this provision in the various EU treaties. The Dutch are still refusing the reasons. They have also refused to acknowledge I was even at OC Zee-wolde, one of their finer Observation Centres – the official term. (They disliked the term ‘camp’.) I have some forty pages of official documents, from the local Chief of Police down, from my stay there.
After six years my GP is still being refused the results of medical tests carried out on me by the Dutch at their own request. I had collapsed in an Amsterdam street the night before I claimed asylum. I was taken to Onze Lieve Vrouwe Gasthuis (Notre Dame Hospital) because I had ID on me indicating I was a Catholic. OLVG has since confirmed I was treated as a stroke victim. Apart from the standard medical any applicant received, the Dutch had asked my permission for a follow-up series of toxicological tests. I’m told that I show no post-stroke symptoms. I have no history of high blood pressure. I don’t know that there’s any connection between these events but I’m more than curious as to the silence of the Dutch concerning the medical evidence. They initiated the toxicological tests after my first medical. I was never given the results.(5)
In the beginning…
I was a student at the Polytechnic of North London (PNL) between 1978 and 1981, graduating with a first in English. Patricia Legg was a student on the same course. At that time she was married to Thomas Legg, a senior civil servant in the Lord Chancellor’s Department, now Sir Thomas Legg and until his recent retirement, the Permanent Secretary at that department. Pat and I were later to marry. Pat had told me that her marriage was more or less a dead letter, although as I came to know later Legg hadn’t quite regarded it in that light.
In 1981, the period when Pat and I had decided to marry, Thomas Legg was due to be promoted from undersecretary to deputy secretary; that is from the grade 3 post of Administrator of the South-Eastern Circuit(6) to the grade 2 post of Head of Judicial Appointments, and subsequently Deputy Clerk of the Crown in Chancery – in effect, deputy head of the Crown Office. Barring accidents, he would be the next Permanent Secretary. After some friction between Legg and herself, Pat and I married. We were subsequently divorced in 1985.
I had recently been involved in student politics as a member of the Labour Club, and was elected to the sabbatical post of Vice-President, a post from which I resigned and went back to my course. While living in Sheffield in 1977, I had been briefly a member of the Communist Party and Chairman of the Netherthorpe Branch. Pat had told me that Legg’s job was positively vetted; consequently I asked her whether my political background was likely to raise any problems. She said that she thought not because both his parents and hers had been members of the CPGB in the thirties and this had caused no previous problems.
Towards the end of our marriage, she accused me of having targeted Legg (through her) because of his position. This position was more sensitive politically than I had assumed. I had taken the Lord Chancellor’s Department to be purely administrative in function and would only have thought about any possible political repercussions if Legg had held a similar position at, say, the MOD or the Foreign Office.
After fully investigating me, an investigation of which I was unaware at the time, the Security Service, with a little help from Legg, took the view that Legg had indeed been targeted by the Communist Party in concert with its Soviet allies. They reached this absurd conclusion through two main considerations.
1) Upon investigation, they found my past to be obscure. After leaving my home town of Wigan in my mid-twenties in 1973, I had spent some three years in London, before moving to Sheffield. There, without any previous record of political activity or involvement, I had become the chairman of a CP branch after two months membership of the party. I had resigned from the CP in ‘obscure’ circumstances after only six months and distanced myself from them. At PNL I became involved in politics again and received equally rapid ‘promotion’, winning the post of secretary in a by-election only a few weeks after joining the Labour Club. Most significantly to them, I had resigned the sabbatical post of Vice-President without taking it up after winning a further election, and gone back to my course – with the result that I shared final year seminars with Mrs Legg. It was discovered that one of our seminar leaders had been Peter Bowering who had been one of George Blake’s tutors in Wormwood Scrubs. This was crucial to later developments. There were also very few public records concerning myself: I had never been issued with a passport or a driving license and my National Insurance records didn’t go back beyond 1975.(7)
The conclusion drawn was that I was some kind of political operator, and had probably never left the CPGB but, after having become involved in student politics, I had come across a tempting target, Mrs Legg. She was nine years older than me and had a serious of indiscreet relationships including some with members of staff at PNL, relationships of which her husband had been unaware. MI5 were concerned because, as David Shayler has recently confirmed, they thought that some junior members of the CPGB had been recruited as KGB assets in this period, and that I was one such.
For MI5, 1977, the year I left the party, was crucial: as Shayler has stated, they (rather strongly) entertained the possibility that Peter Mandelson was KGB. They subsequently took a great interest in him. It was established that as a student politician I had known and worked with other student politicals who knew the London Weekend Television circle that Mandelson frequented. It was also discovered that my brother, a non-identical twin, had spent the late summer and most of the autumn of 1968 in Paris before setting of on an overland trip to India. He had a Yugoslavian girlfriend whose father had been active in the wartime resistance.
MI5 thought the situation so obvious as to be hardly worth arguing about. In short, I was a Soviet spook. At the time, I knew nothing of the background. When Pat had burst into tears early in the relationship, asking me where I met my Soviet friends, I’d thought it a bad joke on MI5’s part. Later, to test me out, Pat casually arranged little trips taking in Portman Square, Blunt’s old flat, and the MI5 registry in Curzon Street. She remarked on the odd architecture. I still didn’t get it. She arranged a little trip to Portland Bill – where Soviet agents Houghton and Gee had worked – and asked me if the place had any historical significance.
The real Thomas Legg
Tom Legg’s own relations with the Security Service were not just those which any senior civil servant might have had. Amongst other things, he had responsibilities which involved liaison with the legal section of the Security Service, whose head at that time was Bernard Sheldon. He also had social connections. His Cambridge college, St John’s was a source of recruitment (this is now on public record) and a senior figure in the British Intelligence Community, Sir Martin Furnival Jones, an ex-Director General of MI5, was President of the Board of Governors at Frensham Heights, the co-educational school which both Legg and Pat had attended in the fifties. They were also friends of Julian Faux and Cecil Shipp, both future Deputy Director Generals of MI5.(8)
Another friend of Pat’s was Stuart-Smith (now Lord Justice Stuart-Smith, recently the Security Commissioner).(9) The Lord Chancellor’s Department is instrumental in appointing a suitable candidate to the post. Legg has never lost touch with these contacts, which might explain why, with his background, he’d had no vetting difficulties in the past. Generally, his post was considered to be sensitive because of the nature of the Lord Chancellor’s Department: it is the department of State where parliament, the executive and the judiciary meet, and where in practice there is a minimum separation of powers. For example, the independence of the judiciary when it comes to security matters is largely a constitutional fiction. In practice, the Lord Chancellor’s Department with the Attorney-General has fixed things with MI5’s legal executive. For example, it is now admitted(10) that when George Blake was arrested, he was deprived of his legal rights and a suitably compliant solicitor was given to him. The lawyer acted against Blake’s interests and in the interest of the Government. This attitude later spread and became the norm in Whitehall.(11)
After Pat had refused to sever her relationship with me, Legg was given a straight choice: separate himself immediately from her or lose his security clearance. This would have meant losing his job. The ultimatum was issued after Legg came to know about Pat’s numerous other relationships because this meant that the positive vetting statements regarding their marriage had been false for many years. This was not only an embarrassment for him but also for the Security Service and indicated a serious failure of vetting procedures.
Repercussions
I had been given an unconditional three-year post-graduate research award. This was cancelled on the grounds that my letter of acceptance had never been received by the Department of Education and Science (DES), despite evidence as to its posting. Despite numerous requests and enquiries from me, the DES refused to reconsider the matter. After knocking my head against a brick wall for some time, I instructed a solicitor to consult Counsel with a view to applying to the High Court for immediate injunctive-relief for breach of contract but my application didn’t have time to reach the court. The DES suddenly reversed their decision in circumstances such as to leave no doubt that in originally withdrawing the award they had been acting on the instructions of the Security Service, and were also aware of the impending application for an injunction. Apart from the solicitor involved, this was something known only to Pat and Thomas Legg. Pat confirmed that the DES had been acting on the instructions of MI5 at the time, and before our separation and divorce, justifying it on the ground that government agencies had a duty to counter an organised attempt at ‘Marxist subversion’. The only reason they had backed down is that in applying for an emergency injunction, I had left them no time in which to prepare, and the Treasury Solicitor would have either had to appear in open court with the relevant papers or have issued a Public Interest Immunity Certificate. The latter would have been rather embarrassing and have simply confirmed (publicly) the real reason for the withdrawal. The junior education minister responsible for the case was William Waldegrave and the Assistant Secretary in charge of the case was a personal friend of both Legg and Pat’s. Both these facts are on record.(12)
In summary, MI5 refused to accept as a coincidence the fact that a senior civil servant, and one so uniquely vulnerable, in a sensitive department, had a wife who just happened to run off, as they saw it, with an ex-communist some nine years younger than herself. Pat and I finally married and the whole affair, although it left behind a sour taste, faded into the background, until some years later in 1984 when the Ponting affair erupted into our lives.
Ponting
In August 1984, we received a series of increasingly odd phone calls. The first was from Michael Zander, Professor of Law at London University, and also the legal correspondent for the Guardian, and an old Cambridge friend of Legg’s. (Legg was his lobby contact.) Pat took the call and I was present throughout. Zander wanted to contact Legg urgently. Pat was a little embarrassed that he didn’t seem to know about her and Tom’s separation and subsequent remarriage, but gave him the phone number of Legg’s mother in Devon, where he was on holiday.
The following Tuesday Legg rang and Pat, at his instigation, asked me to leave the room while she spoke to him. She said that he had indicated that there might be further enquiries from people trying to contact him and would we not tell anyone where he was. Assuming the matter was confidential, I agreed to this. Later that day, and while Pat was out, I answered the phone and someone who repeatedly refused to identify himself insisted on either speaking to Legg or being told his whereabouts. I refused and offered to take the speaker’s number where I told him that Legg would contact him. He became very angry and hung up. When Pat returned I told her about the call and she said that from my description of the content and tone (the caller had seemed to regard Legg as an errant office-boy) she thought the call was probably from Downing Street, either from the Cabinet Office or the Prime Minister’s Private Office. I’d already reached that conclusion myself.
Two days later, we heard the news of Clive Ponting’s arrest on the television news. I asked Pat if this was what the phone calls had been about and she agreed that it seemed so. As it turned out, Legg had already told her. After the public announcement of Ponting’s prosecution, we received a final phone call from Zander. According to Pat, he was extremely angry and said that Legg was a liar whom he would never trust again. Legg had broken a cardinal rule of the Westminster game: one may evade a question from one’s lobby contact, but one must never lie. I was present throughout this phone call. I subsequently pieced together what had happened – Pat confirmed most of it.
After having been discovered as the source of the leak to Tam Dayell, Ponting had come to a gentlemen’s agreement that he would resign; he would not be prosecuted. This agreement was reached just before Pat and I received Zander’s first phone-call. But the Prime Minister was no gentleman. Mrs Thatcher had returned from holiday on the Tuesday and was informed about Ponting. She decided to renege on the agreement Ponting thought he had and nail him to the dock at the Old Bailey – to encourage the others. Legg was one of those chosen to execute the task. These decisions had traditionally been left to the Attorney-General, but Mrs Thatcher essayed a constitutional innovation, and one which is still of contemporary relevance. She decided that dealing with the ‘enemy within’ overrode constitutional niceties – and the Lord Chancellor’s Department was the chosen instrument. The phone call I had received from inner Whitehall was the distant echo of a bark which translated as, ‘Where the hell is Legg?’ Hiding in the country, apparently. Cometh the hour, cometh the man.
In the course of the next month Pat’s attitude to Ponting changed. She had initially taken a line similar to my own which was sympathetic to Ponting’s claim that while he had technically broken the Official Secrets Act, his breach was justified on the grounds of public interest because it seemed that ministers had lied to Parliament. After having had some personal contact with Legg, she became hostile towards Ponting and began to represent him as an over promoted grammar school oik who had betrayed the trust placed in him. Our own past was dredged up again and she became more explicit about the Security Service’s previous interest in me. She also began to deny that Legg had any part in the Ponting affair, despite both her previous admissions and the evidence of our senses. My research award was suddenly withdrawn again and despite enquiries to my college, Kings, and the DES no explanation or reason was (ever) given. My letters were ignored. I had been through this before and had no wish to repeat the experience. I consulted a solicitor about a divorce.
The marriage disintegrated in parallel with developments in the Ponting affair. Pat began to threaten me, saying directly that she now believed that my only interest in her had been as a conduit to get at Legg. She also said that he had not then been in a position to protect himself, but that he now was, she ‘wouldn’t like to be in my shoes’: Legg had friends and colleagues who were more powerful than he was himself. I asked her whether she was threatening me with Downing Street or MI5, or both, to which she replied, ‘What do you think?’ Such possibilities as that I had travelled abroad, either without a passport or using a false one were suggested. I had few doubts then (and have none now) that these suggestions came through Legg and his colleagues in MI5 and that Pat had only added her own gloss. She also indicated that despite my being in the middle of a doctorate, I would become virtually unemployable. This was remarkably prescient of her.
Trying to fabricate an Irish ‘connection’
Towards the end of February 1985, within a few days of Ponting’s acquittal, and while we were hardly on speaking terms, Pat surprised me by suggesting that we take a short holiday together. Her suggested venue was even more surprising, South Armagh, where she said that some (unnamed) friends had recommended a village named Upperchurch. I later discovered that there is no village of that name in Northern Ireland, but that it is the name of a village in the Republic of Ireland where my maternal great-grandfather, ‘Jimmy’ Kinnane, was born. How Pat came to know this fact, of which neither myself nor my family were aware at the time, is a mystery – unless she had been informed through the people who had exhaustively investigated my background, MI5.(13) I refused to go to Northern Ireland. I knew that part of Legg’s job involved liaison with the security forces in Northern Ireland and Pat had already threatened me with MI5.
Trying to fabricate a Howard Marks ‘connection’
As a compromise, she suggested that we spend a weekend in Amsterdam. I agreed to this. While in Amsterdam, she engineered a trip to a boutique I later found to have been associated with Howard Marks, a convicted drug smuggler and associate of an arms supplier to Northern Irish terrorist groups, James McCann. This boutique was off the tourist routes in Amsterdam but Pat walked straight to it. She later suggested that she buy a dress from there, saying that the shop reminded her of one she used to buy clothes from in Oxford some dozen years before. Marks had also owned that boutique as I later discovered. Pat tried to insist on my paying for the dress by cheque even though I had no chequeing facilities in Holland. She then suggested that either I did have such facilities or at least access to banking facilities, despite this being my first visit to Holland. In the end, she didn’t buy the dress. At the start of our relationship, and without mentioning his name, she had said that some years before she had known someone involved in drug smuggling and arms running for groups in Northern Ireland and that this person had operated in West London. I hadn’t believed her and thought she was merely attempting to make herself ‘interesting’, as she saw it. Apart from her own assertions, I have never found any evidence linking her with Marks or his associates. Marks had in fact operated around the Notting Hill area, where I was living while at PNL. I had also lived there earlier in the seventies before moving to Sheffield. Pat and I had spent our first weekend together near Lavenham in Suffolk while Marks was on trial at the Old Bailey, and had visited The Swan where he had been arrested some months earlier. She also took me to the Warwick Castle, a pub in Maida Vale associated with Marks.
Illegal bank accounts
Immediately before going to Amsterdam, Pat had suggested, in an offer of reconciliation, that we open a new and shared current bank account. Up to that time our banking arrangements had been very simple. Pat had a current account into which her various salaries were paid and a deposit account into which she paid a third of her income to cover her tax-liabilities because she was technically self-employed. I had a current account into which my research award was paid every term. These accounts were separate and neither of us had drawing rights on the other’s account(s). I agreed to the new shared current account and signed a letter of consent to Pat’s bank. Since that time, now some nine years ago, I have never heard anything about this account nor been able to obtain evidence that it was ever opened.
Upon our return from Amsterdam, there were waiting for Pat cheque-books for two new accounts (one deposit and one current) in her name alone. She said that there must have been some mistake and our new account would no doubt arrive in a few days. It didn’t, but after Pat had vacated the house within a few days of our return and taken the children by her marriage to Legg to her parents, there arrived in the post more news from her bank. She had taken out yet another current account in her name, the cheque-book for which was to be delivered to her parent’s address. A couple of days later there arrived fresh cheque-books for her original current and deposit accounts but this time they were also in my name: they had been changed to joint-accounts and they now contained £10,000 between them. (At one point there were nine cheque-books involved.) This was done without informing me and without my permission. I later found out that Pat had already instructed her solicitors to sue for divorce before the issue of these new accounts and a few days before she suggested to me that we open a joint-account for the purposes of reconciliation. After consulting my solicitor, I withdrew £100 from the accounts in my name for immediate living expenses to establish that the accounts did indeed exist and then had them both frozen.
Some eight weeks later and against the advice of my solicitor, who had pointed out that legally, at least, the accounts and their contents were mine as much as Pat’s, I unfroze the joint accounts and renounced any interest in them. This was at Pat’s request, so that she could pay her outstanding tax-bill. Her accountant, Dennis Robertson, then took immediate measures to ensure that this tax-bill should be in my name, arranged with the Inland Revenue that it need not be paid for a further two years, despite its being overdue by two years already. He also claimed various obscure tax-benefits in my name and against my financial interests. This latter move took place after Pat and I were legally financially separated. I have documentary evidence for this. The Inland Revenue made no objection to any of this and gave me no information concerning it until I officially requested it from them over a year later. The information they then gave was mimimal and restricted to the amount of Pat’s bill which was in my name – all of it for the period we were married. They simply ignored my written request that Mr Robertson not be allowed to negotiate my affairs with them. I have subsequently been informed that the possibility that these accounts were opened accidentally is mimimal, and that a bank accidentally transferring some £10,000 from someone’s account(s) to another name is likely to face a claim for heavy damages. As far as I know, at least, there was no complaint made. Legally, both names on a joint-account have to authorise a complaint and I was never approached about this.
The point of a sudden access of money in my name was that it would have breached the terms of my research award which limited my income to £1,000 a year. I believe that I wasn’t meant to be aware of it and I would certainly have sworn in an affidavit that I didn’t have that amount of money. This would have made me seem guilty of fraud and perjury, of course. (By this time I suspected I was being set-up.) I don’t see how any of this could have happened without the knowledge of Pat and her accountant, Dennis Robertson.
Dennis Robertson
The late Mr Robertson was in sole charge of Pat’s financial affairs and is now of some contemporary interest. As has publicly emerged recently, Mr Robertson, a senior partner in Stoy Hayward, an international firm of accountants, was the auditor for Astra, one of the firms involved in the Iraqi arms scandal. He was also Nasil Adir’s auditor, and hence instrumental in persuading the City that Mr Nadir could sell citrus-fruit with a profit, say, of £2 a lemon. Why Mr Robertson, an accountant in charge of Nadir’s putative £2.5 billion business empire, should have personally taken charge of the financial affairs of Pat, a music teacher with an salary of £14,000 per annum and with no private income, is an unanswered question.
After our divorce, I spent nearly two years trying to establish the details of these accounts through the period leading up to the financial hearing. This hearing should have been unnecessary since there was no dispute about the house, general assets or alimony payments. I had claimed £2,000 with standing instructions to my solicitor that this could be negotiated down to £800 or abandoned, with the proviso that the financial records of the marriage be produced; that is, the records of the bank accounts which had so suddenly appeared. On the dissolution of a marriage, this right of financial discovery is a minimum right for both parties. Pat’s solicitors opposed this for nearly two years. Finally, we settled after I had reached the limits of my legal aid, some £2,000 – equal to the amount of the claim – and after Pat had agreed to pay her own taxes. The final settlement (in my favour) was £600. Thus, Pat’s solicitors had fought for two years and she had paid in addition to her own legal costs (not legally aided, so presumably more than my £2,000) some £600 solely for the benefit of denying a publication of those accounts and the circumstances in which they were taken out. My purpose was not to claim £2,000 from Pat since the joint-accounts in which I had freely renounced an interest contained some £10,000, money which was legally mine as much as hers. All this is on record.
The legal file on the case contained some seven hundred pages and, except for my initial eviction from the matrimonial home, was concerned with this ostensibly very small dispute. Some seventy pages of it concern the repeated attempts of my solicitor to ratify my legal aid, which was unaccountably delayed for five months. In this part of the correspondence my solicitor was informed that letters he had written and in which he had enclosed documents had arrived without the documents being in the envelope. Other letters, including those from myself, never arrived. We on our side received the second and third parts of a correspondence without having received the initial letter. Legal aid was withdrawn and my solicitor was then forbidden to represent me except for the purpose of reclaiming it. This went on (without explanation) for five months until a few days before the decree nisi, when legal aid was suddenly reinstated.
Trying to fabricate an armed robbery ‘connection’
It was at this time that I found myself involved in an attempted armed robbery. A man deliberately blocked my path and engaged me in conversation outside Agar Grove sub post office some twenty yards from my flat. I regularly – at the same time, on the same day – phoned my family from the telephone box there. After about a minute’s conversation, I went into the box to make my call. Before I had time to begin talking to my brother who answered the phone, the burglar alarm on the post office began to ring. I looked up and saw the man I had been talking to moments before running out of the post office. But he was now wearing either a balaclava or a ski-hood pulled over his head. I immediately informed my brother that I seemed to be witnessing a robbery and hung up. I walked to the corner around which the man had run, a distance of some twenty feet, but he had disappeared. Although I had only seen the one man I very gingerly pushed open the door to the post office and prepared to duck if there was anyone else inside. I found only the man who owned the shop hiding behind the counter. I tried to calm him down and explained what I’d witnessed, and he confirmed that the man concerned had just attempted an armed robbery. We waited for the police to arrive and I gave my name and address as a witness. These events were filmed on the shop’s video security camera.
I was interviewed a day or two later by two young CID officers. I took care to have a witness present throughout. The interview lasted an hour and I signed a 2-3 page statement describing the events. I gave a clear and detailed description of the man involved, and left no doubt that I could identify him again. The officers were obviously puzzled about the whole affair and particularly about the man’s motive for forcing a conversation on a witness immediately before attempting an armed robbery. But my description of the events and the man, which seemed to tally exactly with both the video evidence, and the shopkeeper’s description (with the difference that I had seen the robber’s face), seemed to convince them that I was telling the truth. One of them remarked on the clarity and detail of the description. After I had signed a formal statement, we chatted informally for five minutes or so. They broached the obvious topic of whether anyone would have a reason for involving me in such a situation. Though I believed even then that the whole series of events had been a set-up from start to finish, I merely asked why anyone should involve a post-graduate student struggling to finish a PhD, and in the middle of a divorce, in an armed robbery. They said they would contact me in a few days time. I never heard anything about these events ever again. The police subsequently denied me any information about them and refused either to confirm or deny that there had been an attempted armed robbery on that day; and, as far as I know, the events received no coverage in the local press. Some ten weeks later I was burgled, all my financial records and two-thirds of the draft of my PhD thesis were stolen. Oddly enough, the thieves left a new (portable) colour TV and other objects of value including a camera worth some £300. I reported this to the police.
Enter the INLA
Some eighteen months later I was involved in another incident. On the evening of March 8, 1987, I was invited to a club for a drink by two Irish men (one with an Ulster accent and the other with one from the South) with whom I’d struck up a casual conversation in the Half-Way House, a pub in Camden. We ended up at a club at the bottom of the Holloway Road near Highbury Corner. The man who had suggested the place went to talk with a group of people he said he knew. It became obvious that I was the topic of conversation. A man detached himself from the group and came to talk with me at the bar. He was intelligent and seemed to be in charge of the place. He said that they hadn’t seen me in there before. He asked me about myself. As I gave him more details, he became more and more sceptical about the replies. I ended up laying any ID I had with me on the bar – student card, British Museum library card, London University library card, etc. He then said that all these could be have been forged and offered me some half-dozen (English) names, asking if I didn’t also use them. These names were specific – he didn’t pluck them out of the air – but I didn’t recognise them. He then asked me whether or not I was Welsh. Or Jewish. I lost my temper and said, ‘Do I sound fucking Welsh?’ He then went back to the group, leaving me with the impression that he hadn’t believed a word I’d said. Within minutes of his going back to the group, the rest of them, with the exception of the one who had brought us there, came up to me at the bar. There were two men, both in their late twenties, and a women who seemed a few years younger. They had Belfast accents. The woman was drunk. They suggested that I go for a drink with them. I refused. The woman made various drunken moves to encourage me while one of the men, who later turned out to be her husband, woodenly repeated the invitation. They went back to their table after further refusals. I started to regret not having left earlier, particularly when the same group shortly returned.
They repeated the performance. The woman started to abuse me about what seemed to be a recent killing in Northern Ireland before pulling herself together and starting to make some crude sexual overtures, to which her husband affected indifference and merely repeated his invitation to ‘Come back for a drink.’ This continued despite my saying that the situation was so obviously rigged that they needed a better drama coach. The place was now closing. I’d been confident that nothing was actually going to happen while the place was crowded, but faced with the choice of staying or leaving, I decided to leave.
They left with me, again attempting to persuade me to go home with them. The situation outside simply turned on who panicked first. They had a car outside and tried to persuade me to get in it. The woman became hysterical and shouted, ‘Grab the fucking cunt’; she also abused them as cowards. They more or less panicked and bundled her into the car instead. If I’d panicked, they would have tried to bundle me into the car.
I managed to get a taxi home to Stamford Hill and immediately phoned Liz, my ex-girlfriend to describe what had happened. It was now 2:30 in the morning. I’d thrown my coat in the corner before phoning Liz and the following morning found a copy of the previous day’s Independent stuffed into one of the pockets. This had a report of a killing in Northern Ireland which had been circled in green. I realised it could only have got there when the woman had rubbed herself up against me the previous night. The killing had been that of an INLA member by a splinter-group, the IPLO. This was what the woman had seemed to associate me with. The two groups had reached the end of a killing spree, starting with the killing of the wife of INLA leader Dominic McGlinchey, some weeks before. Both the IPLO and the INLA are regarded as having been heavily penetrated – and, more controversially, to some extent controlled – by the security forces in Northern Ireland. I suspect I wouldn’t have survived five minutes if I had got into the car that night; the newspaper which had been placed in my pocket would simply have identified me as a victim of inter-gang terrorist rivalry. I believed at the time (as I still do) that the incident was the result of a conspiracy to murder initiated by the Security Service (MI5) and with me as the intended victim. I thought about reporting this to the police after it had happened but concluded that this would merely result in a record of my having associated myself with a terrorist group – in effect, making another attempt easier.
I later came to believe that the man in the Irish club had been told by the man who took me there that I was either Howard Marks or a close associate and that my replies would confirm this. I was the same age as Marks and similar enough physically to fit a general description. We also had similar backgrounds: both provincial, working-class and educated enough to have registered as doctoral students. Marks had even undertaken a teacher-training course, and I was at that time registered at London University for a Post Graduate Certificate in Education. During my grilling at the bar, the man hadn’t expressed any scepticism about the various forms of academic ID I had shown him – only about my name. I later learned that Marks had often used various fictitious names and had serious MI6 connections. I had given the man who took us to the club no personal details about myself, not even in the conversation in the Half-Way House. That rules out coincidence, no matter how bizarre.
I immediately connected this conversation with the things Pat had told me; in particular, the story about knowing someone who smuggled drugs and arms seems too similar to the line this man had taken for it to be a coincidence – again, no matter how bizzare.
Dennis Robertson FCA, RIP
Recently there have been three independent claims, by Gerald James, the ex-Chairman of Astra, Elizabeth Forsyth, the ex-Chairman of Asil Nadir’s family trust, South Audley Management, and myself, that Dennis Robertson was the author of our several misfortunes. Gerald James has stated that Robertson signed off a false audit, thus helping to cripple Astra. Elizabeth Forsyth has said that Robertson stood by as both the Serious Fraud Office and the Director of Public Prosecutions rolled over her and Nadir. She was imprisoned for fraud and theft but released after it emerged at her Appeal that the Crown had sat on evidence for five years. They had in their possession some seventy pages of documents concerning Robertson and previously unknown interviews he had with the Serious Fraud Office. Nadir believes that his problems began when he refused cooperation with the US State Department in undermining the Denktas regime in Turkish Cyprus. Stories about Nadir’s alleged arms and drug dealing began to circulate. Sound familiar? Michael Allcock, a tax inspector recently jailed for corruption, has claimed that he was fitted up after investigating a Conservative ex-government minister who was alleged to have relations with Nadir. Allcock had interviewed Robertson. Allcock was also investigating Howard Marks.
In 1994, I contacted Pat through her solicitor and asked for an account of the banking and taxation affairs during our marriage. I indicated that a subpoena would be issued if the reply was unsatisfactory. Through her solicitor, she contradicted the two main claims she had made on oath. She now stated that, contrary to her original affidavits, we had been separately taxed, and that my name had been on some of her bank accounts. The reply also implied that I was guilty of fraud. I issued a notice of preaction discovery for Robertson’s files during our marriage. She immediately left the country, closed her house down, putting it up for sale and separating herself from family and friends of thirty years. She has an Australian passport and can thus put herself beyond British jurisdiction. It is difficult to understand how Pat, who never earned more than £14,000 a year, could afford Robertson’s services. He audited billions a year.
In all, Pat committed some half-dozen acts of perjury in various affidavits, including such silly ones as testifying that she had divorced Legg when, in fact, he was the petitioner. None of these statements were ever questioned despite their contradiction of available public records. My copies are available for inspection.
Blacklisted
I qualified as a teacher, applied for various teaching jobs in 1989, and in the London boroughs of Wandsworth, Lewisham and Tower Hamlets I was offered jobs subject to the standard police check. The offers were withdrawn without reason except for Wandsworth who told me, ‘Sorry, its very embarrassing, but not our fault.’ I got a job with Hammersmith and Fulham, at Fulham Cross School, and signed the contract before the school made its police check. After the check it all changed and they wanted my resignation – without making it clear why. My head of department said, ‘I’m not going to sacrifice my career for you.’ I don’t know what the police check reveals – there is no obligation to reveal the contents to individuals. At Fulham Cross I fought for 18 months to stay in the job and complete my teaching probation. I eventually ‘failed’ my probation on a lesson which didn’t take place. I was in Wigan, signed-off ill, at the time the alleged lesson was said to have been observed.
This was when I decided to got to Holland go try and get to the bottom of this.
Which is where we came in at the beginning.
Notes
- Royer, (1976) European Court Review case number 497 (1976) 2 CMLR 619.
- Bonsignore, Case 67/94 (1975) ECR 297; (1975) 1 CMLR 472
- Bouchereau Case 30/77 (1977) ECR 1999; (1977) 2 CMLR 800
- Royer, para 3 of the Ruling
- It has emerged recently from the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission, that a standard technique used by BOSS in the eighties and early nineties was the chemical inducement of a ‘stroke’ or ‘heart attack’. Press reports have stated that these chemicals were probably developed by the British at Porton Down and given to the South Africans.
- In which capacity he appointed the judge who stitched-up Colin Wallace’s trial.
- I later found out this to be rubbish. Records were computerised in the mid-seventies. MI5 gave Pat the impression that this meant I had no records. In fact, for the period between my leaving school at fifteen and arriving in Sheffield at twenty-nine, there seemed to be few official records at all.
- I once met Faux socially. He arrived at a house for lunch when Pat and I were visiting. He made his excuses and left within minutes of Pat introducing me. I didn’t know that he was head of A4, MI5’s surveillance unit, at the time. I had assumed he was a spook – a ‘friend at the Home Office’, as Pat used to engagingly phrase it.
- The Security Commissioner is the person one complains to about the activities of MI5.I haven’t bothered using that particular channel. To date, Stuart-Smith hasn’t upheld any complaint about MI5’s activities.
- See Tom Bower’s recent biography of Sir Dick White, The Perfect English Spy, Heinemann, London 1995.
- According to David Shayler, the current favourite to succeed Stephen Lander as head of MI5 is Ms Manningham Buller, whose father prosecuted Blake. She’s an ex-Head of Surveillance. Her nickname is rumoured to be ‘Keyhole Kate’.
- As is the extraordinarily intemperate letter of Waldegrave to my complaint where he expressed the opinion (after I had been granted the research award as a result of public and competitive examination) that my application was parasitical on the public purse. Waldegrave had in the past received a post-graduate scholarship himself. Waldegrave’s attitude to telling the truth when the security/intelligence services are involved is, of course, a matter of recent public record.
- Throughout the marriage Pat revealed a knowledge of my family background which I was able to check only through researching public records. Her knowledge was invariably accurate.