Monday, October 31, 2011

Met officers allegedly 'received £20,000 bribes from private detectives', what happened to our country that it turned so rotten?















Dear All

It is not unreasonable to expect nothing more than absolute loyalty from our Police Forces in the way they execute their jobs.

However, society is collapsing under unfairness, inequality and corruption, this has infected the Police.

Scotland Yard is investigating claims that its officers took bribes.

And in return, they leaked sensitive information from an ongoing criminal investigation.

This shocking revelation is being picked over by anti-corruption detectives who have launched a probe into allegations that serving Met officers were paid by private investigators.

The private detectives were working for an international politician.

Documents sent to the Met are suggesting that a high-profile figure hired investigators to obtain information on a police investigation into his business affairs.

The papers Met officers £20,000 were bought off and released inside information that helped his defence lawyers.

A Scotland Yard spokesman said:

"We received a complaint alleging that illegal payments had been made to police officers for information (unconnected to phone hacking or the media). The Directorate of Professional Standards referred the matter to the Independent Police Complaints Commission and they have agreed to supervise a DPS investigation into the allegations."

This falls on top of the already toxic investigation running in the Met regarding officers who received illegal payments from the Murdoch media empire for private information on the royal family.

In the past, the Police and the Press have worked closely together for mutual benefit but somewhere down the line, the relationship went bad.

Extremely bad, and we have a situation were we can’t trust our own Police Force, the leaking of information is so serious that prosecutions are needed if allegations are proven by the acquiring of evidence.

When the Murdoch scandal blew in the face of News International, the fallout was also claiming the scalps of two senior Met officers, Commissioner Sir Paul Stephenson and Assistant Commissioner John Yates.

The Labour Party has done well, for them this is a great scandal, Tom Watson, the Labour MP who helped to expose the phone-hacking, has had a lift up several levels in the eyes of the public.

He said:

"This is a very serious development and goes to the heart of the inappropriate relationships between the Met and [private investigators] that have emerged in recent months."

Adding:

The inquiry was launched after leaked invoices, seen by this newspaper, showed private investigators billed the politician for information from police. One £5,000 payment was allegedly made to a source for information "on forthcoming strategy to be deployed by police. The Standard understands this was a named Met police detective. Another invoice shows the agency billed the politician £700 for a four-hour meeting about "eliciting feedback... during earlier police interviews".

It seems that the Met has a lot of questions to answer about this affair and were the money trail leads, for the moment the alleged corrupt police officers, the international politician and the private detective agency but cannot name them for legal reasons.

But I suspect that in due course, this will hit the headlines, and if guilty those officers who took bribes should be prosecuted, dismissed from the service and handed down prison sentences.

We need our institutions to have total public confidence, unfortunately, like politicians trust has fallen to a new low.

The reason, the wrong people keep getting into power, and the result is nothing gets done, the service provided is second rate at best and the institutions actively work against the people they were set up to serve and protect.

Its stinks!

Yours sincerely

George Laird
The Campaign for Human Rights at Glasgow University

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

I'm surprised that this comes as a shock, George.

While there are many police who are good guys, there are also many (and I've met both sorts) who are crooks.

Some get pleasure from the way they persecute the unfortunate; some abuse power for their or their families' benefit; some cheat and lie about people they dislike, or like; and some take bribes.

Some are plain incompetent and for
some reason still manage to be promoted to very senior ranks.

It does seem that the Met is particularly badly affected, but perhaps that's because seemingly anything of any import, and therefore high profile, happens on their patch. Only Lothian and Borders has that kind of status in Scotland, and even then, it is far less reported in the English dominated press.

Who could forget the woman who was in charge of the anti-terrorism case in which J-C De Menezes was killed, who couldn't find her own briefing room and has ended up in charge of anti terrorism, when the previous guy had to resign because he'd been fiddling for Rupert?

Anonymous said...

their are loads of theifs in the police force but before the get charged the resign from the force it outragous that keep getting away with it same as MPs lawyers
and judges they police their own and that cant be right an out side boady should investigate them and
then you would see the them all runing for cover thiefing bastards
the lot of them
cjm