KEVIN HALLIGEN IN COURT TODAY (22-7-10)

Interesting - why is this reported in Australia?? Can't find anything in British press. Could it be 'old' news?? Is there any way of checking if he's appearing in Court??

Doceedo wrote:Interesting - why is this reported in Australia?? Can't find anything in British press. Could it be 'old' news?? Is there any way of checking if he's appearing in Court??

Yes.

Ring City of Westminster Magistrates' Court.

There might be a report in tomorrow's papers.

If not, I for one will want to know why.

'WHAT A DIFFERENCE A DAY MAKES'

Kevin Halligen - 23 and 24 November 2009

Kate and Gerry McCann duped out of £300,000 by security consultant who promised the earth


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LAST UPDATED 7:06 AM, NOVEMBER 23, 2009

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More than two years after the disappearance of Madeleine McCann from the Portuguese resort of Praia da Luz, it has emerged that Kevin Halligen, a British security consultant hired by the Find Madeleine fund, allegedly conned detectives working on the case out of £300,000.

Halligen, whose firm, Oakley International, is based in Washington DC, was paid £500,000 by the fund to employ private investigators to look for the missing girl. But the Sunday Times has reported that he failed to pay them the money, and has now gone on the run. One detective, Henri [withheld by T.B.], a former national head of undercover operations for the British police, claims that Halligen personally owes him £100,000.

An unnamed friend of Kate and Gerry McCann said that they had suspicions about Halligen, a 50-year-old businessman with a colourful past, from the start. "He had this sense of cloak and dagger, acting as if he were a James Bond-style spy," the friend said. "He promised the earth but it came to nothing."

Another source claimed that Halligen promised to use his contacts in Washington to find satellite images of Praia da Luz and lists of telephone calls from the evening of May 3, 2007, but failed to do so. "All he came up with was a Google Earth image," the source said.

The Conservative MP for the McCann’s constituency of Charnwood, Stephen Dorrell, said: "This man clearly saw a vulnerable family going through a terrible ordeal and the only thing he was focused on was that there were people offering money to help find Madeleine."

Halligen had been living an expensive lifestyle after gaining the Find Madeleine contract, and documents seen by the Sunday Times show that he was flying first class, staying in luxury hotels and being driven around by a chauffeur. But since flying to Rome on holiday last October, Halligen has not returned to his Washington office. He was last seen staying with a girlfriend, under a fake identity, at the Royal Crescent Hotel in Bath.

Before becoming associated with the quest to find Madeleine McCann, Halligen had reportedly pretended to be working for either GCHQ, MI5, MI6 or the CIA, in order to impress his friends. He claimed to have intelligence experience in both Northern Ireland and the Middle East. Two years ago, at a 19th century mansion in Washington, despite already being married, he staged a lavish wedding with a fake priest, in which he pretended to marry a woman called Maria Dybczak in front of an audience of dignitaries.

The McCann money is not the only reason why Halligen is on the run. The US Department of Justice has already issued an arrest warrant against him. They say that he defrauded Trafigura, the Dutch company involved in the [You must be registered and logged in to see this link.] in Africa.

EDITOR'S NOTE: Since this item was posted, Kevin Halligen was arrested on the night of November 24 at a hotel in Oxford. Using the alias Richard Stratton, he is reported to have booked into the Old Bank Hotel with a girlfriend. He faces extradition to the US.



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Wasn't Trafigura's lawyers also CR?

All the rotten apples in one box?
The mccanns have a niche for hiring dodgy people to represent them.

Sunday Times on Halligen, 21 November 2009:

QUOTE

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21 November 2009


THE wedding guests arrived in black limousines to see a British secret agent marry his US government lawyer bride, surrounded by the strictest of security.

From the grand 19th-century Evermay mansion, where the ceremony took place, the guests had commanding views of America’s power base, Washington, DC.

It is a city where former intelligence operatives and military men mix warily with politicians and power-brokers, looking for lucrative government security contracts.

Among the guests at the wedding were a former CIA station chief and a security adviser to Barack Obama. The best man had once been special operations marine colonel.

The guests were some of the best-informed people in the capital. Yet none knew that the wedding was a sham, the priest was an amateur actor and Richard Halligen, the groom, was an imposter.

Halligen, 50, is better known as Kevin Halligen in Britain (or more precisely Halligan with an “a”, according to his birth certificate).

The wedding was part of a illusion that has seen him take in some of the most senior figures in the intelligence world on both sides of the Atlantic with a mixture of charm and trickery.

On the way he has made considerable sums from the Madeleine McCann fund and more than £1m from a deal involving a company accused of dumping toxic waste. He has left a string of creditors behind. His debts are said to amount to more than £3m.

Halligen is now on the run after last being spotted with a girlfriend at the Royal Crescent hotel in Bath.

His pursuers include the former head of undercover operations for the UK police, a City lawyer, a Washington lobbyist, his former bride and a former head of the SAS, who blames himself for helping to launch Halligen into the world of intelligence and security.

The United States justice department, on behalf of the FBI, has issued an indictment seeking his arrest for an alleged £1.2m fraud.

The secretive nature of the security and intelligence community provided the perfect cloak for the talented Mr Halligen. It is a world where people do not talk openly about their past exploits, because they are frequently matters covered by the Official Secrets Act.

A Dubliner by birth, Halligen came to England in the late 1970s and held a series of consultancy jobs as an electronics specialist. His first spell as a director was for his girlfriend’s catering company in Surrey, from which he resigned in 2001.

However, the stories he spun to colleagues and girlfriends about his history were much more colourful. They say he claimed variously to have worked for GCHQ, MI5, MI6 and the CIA, or at least implied as much.

In his résumé he claimed to have worked on government defence projects for more than 20 years. “Kevin,” he wrote of himself, “has operational experience in Northern Ireland and the Middle East and retains close links with special projects, special forces and the international government security community.”

He also claimed to have contributed to a high-level report assessing Britain’s resilience to terrorist attacks. However, this, like his claims to have briefed the Pentagon on Iraq, was at best fanciful.

His first entry into the private security business was as technical director for the Inkerman Group, a company set up by Gerald Moor, an ex-army intelligence officer. The job ended abruptly in 2003 after Halligen drank Moor’s stocks of champagne and “irreplaceable” burgundy while house-sitting for a couple of weeks.

At the same time, the company vetted Halligen and found worrying anomalies. “Nothing seemed to check out. He had two different birth mothers, according to the forms he had filled out,” said Moor.

Once in the security world, however, Halligen began forging business contacts and friendships. A key to this was his membership of the exclusive Special Forces Club in Knightsbridge, central London.

Membership is usually open only to those who have served in the UK’s secret services or special forces, but his name was nonetheless put forward in 2002 by two of the club’s staunchest members: Major Donald Palmer, its then chairman, and Major-General John Holmes, a former commander of the SAS and former director of special forces.

Both men — who knew Halligen through business — now bitterly regret helping him. “We were all taken in,” said Holmes, who now devotes considerable amounts of his time to finding Halligen.

“I feel partly responsible because I introduced him to people, my friends, some of whom are now owed money. I just want to see that he is brought to book.”

Using his contacts, Halligen set up his own companies. His initial venture Chimera (dictionary definition: “vain or idle fantasy”) was short-lived, and Halligen formed Red Defence International in 2004.

It was a crisis in Ivory Coast in September 2006 that was to transform Halligen and his company’s fortunes.

Claude Dauphin, the president of the Dutch company Trafigura, had been seized with another executive in the African state. They were accused of dumping toxic waste near the country’s largest city, Abidjan, which had poisoned thousands of people.

Halligen’s company was paid £460,000 a month to identify the key power brokers in Ivory Coast and negotiate the executives’ safe return. This did not turn out to be enough, however.

By now Halligen was operating from plush offices in Washington and, at some point, had acquired a defence department security pass. He used the cash from Trafigura to hire the services of some of the most powerful private security organisations in the city.

By January 2007, there was real concern. The Christmas deadline for the release of the two executives had passed and their families were becoming desperate.

Halligen met the Trafigura’s British lawyer, Mark Aspinall, at a Washington hotel and asked for an extra £1.2m for a lobbying campaign to persuade the US government to intervene in the dispute.

Aspinall’s London law firm was given the money by Trafigura and paid it into a personal bank account that had been set up by Halligen in Washington.

The money went into his account on January 10 and the following day £1m went out to pay for Halligen’s palatial new home in Great Falls, Virginia.

The two Trafigura executives were freed the following month when the company paid £120m to the Ivory Coast government.

The deal had little to do with Halligen; but the company was so relieved that it did not inquire how he had spent the money intended for lobbying.

Aspinall, meanwhile, had struck up a friendship with Halligen during the crisis. When Halligen asked him to invest in Oakley International, his new Washington company, Aspinall handed over £300,000 and later made a personal loan of another £150,000. He has not seen a penny of that money since.

Halligen is thought to have made £1m in profit from the Trafigura work on top of the money that he spent on his home. He spent thousands of pounds staying at the Willard hotel in Washington — where he met his “bride”, Maria Dybczak, a trade lawyer for the commerce department, when he accidentally stepped on her dress.

Dybczak has spoken to The Sunday Times but did not wish to be quoted in the article.

Halligen had told Dybczak that he had previously worked closely with MI5 and MI6. Sometimes he also claimed, for effect, that he had met her in Bosnia years earlier. He did not tell Dybczak that he already had a wife in Britain whom he had married in 1991 but never divorced.

His £360,000 wedding to Dybczak, in spring 2007, was the perfect opportunity to confirm his entry into the Washington elite. Just 40 hours before the ceremony was due to take place in Washington’s most expensive home, Halligen dropped his bombshell.

He told Dybczak that his spy masters in Britain would not allow his name to be made public on a marriage certificate. “He said he was in ops so black that he could not allow his name to be on anything,” said a source close to Halligen.

The couple persuaded the catering manager, who was the director of a local theatre group, to play the role of the priest.

When Halligen slipped the £120,000 ring on his new “wife’s” finger, the scores of powerful guests had no idea.

One of the guests was Andre Hollis, a lobbyist who became chief executive of Halligen’s Washington company. “It was like a global intelligence debutante ball,” he said. “And nobody knew it was fake.”

Not even the best man, Colonel John Garrett, a defence lobbyist for the blue-chip Washington law firm Patton Boggs, was let in on the secret. Nor was the most powerful guest in the room, Noel Koch, a security expert who has now become a deputy undersecretary in the defence department.

He said: “We found out later that it was not a real wedding. The priest was an actor.”

Koch says Halligen was a curious character: “He used to be difficult to understand because many of the conversations were sotto voce. It was like we’re all spies together and the walls were listening.”

Also on the guest list from England were Palmer, Aspinall and Henri [name withheld by T.B.], a former national head of undercover operations for the police.

It was [name withheld by T.B.]'s expertise that was to be used in the hunt for Madeleine McCann.

Madeleine had been missing for a year when Brian Kennedy, the millionaire philanthropist who had invested heavily in a fund to find the little girl, contacted Halligen’s firm via [name witheld by T.B.].

At the initial meeting, Halligen seemed impressive. He offered the McCanns undercover surveillance and intelligence gathering in Portugal, as well as promising to provide satellite imagery and details of telephone traffic from the night Madeleine disappeared.

The contract was agreed with Oakley International, and the money was paid into the company’s American account through a middle company called Housing Agent Holdings.

Former colleagues say Halligen was out of his depth and had no experience of such investigations. So the detective work on the ground was done by [name withheld by T.B.] and other contractors, who produced a series of reports pointing to new leads.

Halligen was supposed to provide the technical data such as the satellite imagery from his contacts in Washington. “As far as I am aware,” said one source, “all he came up with was a Google Earth image.”

The McCanns themselves were increasingly concerned about Halligen. “He had this sense of cloak and dagger, acting as if he were a James Bond style spy,” said a friend close to the family. “The McCanns found him hard to deal with, because he was forever in another country and using different phones. He promised the earth but it came to nothing.”

The contract came to an end in October last year and was not renewed. Halligen’s company had received £500,000, but the contractors who did the work are owed more than £300,000. Cheques bounced despite Halligen’s promises.

[name withheld by T.B.], who was more than £100,000 out of pocket, switched his investigation into Halligen himself. As a result of his initial inquiries, he approached Aspinall, who was also concerned about his investment.

In October last year, as the pressure mounted, Halligen decided he needed a holiday in Rome. He told Dybczak that his “former employers” in London had leaked details of his undercover operations in Northern Ireland and he needed to go into “hiding”.

While texting Dybczak to say he loved her, he flew first-class to Rome with a new girlfriend and her dog, paid for by his company. They settled in the five-star Cavalieri hotel and enjoyed its Michelin three-star restaurant. The £12,700 bill was paid for on his company credit card.

Back in Washington, it was dawning on Hollis that nobody had been paid and the Madeleine money had gone. The £50,000 he invested in the company had also evaporated. [name withheld by T.B.] and Aspinall called in a forensic accountant to look at the books and the results were alarming.

In just over a year Halligen had skimmed off £600,000 from the company for his personal benefit. More than £150,000 had been spent on improvements on his new house. Payments to labourers, electricians and plumbers were all itemised.

After the first tranches of the Madeleine fund money went into the account, Halligen withdrew more than £130,000 for his personal use. The payments were often disguised as transfers to Dybczak, but she has confirmed the money was for his benefit.

Halligen is now believed to be back in Britain travelling with an old girlfriend. Dybczak has not seen him since he left Italy. He owes her £45,000, and her parents have not been paid back £170,000 they lent him. Patton Boggs, his lawyers, are also owed cash.

Having amassed a file of evidence, Exton called in the FBI, which is now seeking the “secret agent”.

Insight: Jonathan Calvert and Claire Newell

UNQUOTE

Two questions.

ONE: Why did Brian Kennedy sign a contract with this man?

TWO: Who supplied 'The Sunday Times' with this huge amount of information and how much of it is kosher?

aiyoyo wrote:Wasn't Trafigura's lawyers also CR?

All the rotten apples in one box? The McCanns have a niche for hiring dodgy people to represent them.

Be careful, aiyoyo, Carter-Ruck's spies may be watching.

But, yes, Trafigura who illegally dumped toxic waste in West Africa causing serious injury to hundreds and possibly some deaths by their activities, employed...

Carter Ruck and Kevin Halligen.

Dr Gerald McCann and Dr Kate McCann employed...

Carter Ruck and Kevin Halligen.

As far as I know, though, Brian Kennedy is not involved in the Trafigura company - unless Everest fitted all their double glazed windows...

Three - why are the McCanns not seeking to reclaim monies spent and work not done though their dealings with shafter Halligen?

ONE: Why did Brian Kennedy sign a contract with this man?


Could it possibly because he was an expert at what he did i.e. conning people and Mr Kennedy was ermmm conned?? Or have I missed the point?

And aren't you a jolly old Mr Bennett, all this singing - so pleasant that it's making me want to hum aolong too. I shall have Old Michael Finnigan on my brain for hours now.

Kololi wrote:ONE: Why did Brian Kennedy sign a contract with this man?

Could it possibly because he was an expert at what he did i.e. conning people and Mr Kennedy was ermmm conned?? Or have I missed the point?

Yes, with respect, you have totally missed the point.

Does a ruthless and vastly successful businessman like Brian Kennedy suddenly fail to check someone out properly and get himself thoroughly deceived by a con-man? Does he sign legally binding contracts and then hand over hundreds of thousands of 'readies' to a bloke like Halligen?

I doubt it.

It's all very well to blame Metodo 3 and Halligen now. But Kennedy made the decisions to appoint them.

Don't forget that Marcos Aragao Correia (the man who claimed he'd been informed by underworld sources that Madeleine had been absucted, raped, killed and thrown into a lake, then admitted lying and said he'd had a vision of Madeleine being strangled the night after his first Spiritualist Church meeting in Madeira) claimed he was paid by Metodo 3 i.e. by Brian Kennedy to...

a) conduct a search of the Arade Dam for Madeleine's body in the full glare of news cameras

and

b) pursue Goncalo Amaral in the courts until, to quote Correia himself, 'The target was hit'.

Kennedy knew what he was doing in appointing Halligen.

And with equal respect:


Among the guests at the wedding were a former CIA station chief and a security adviser to Barack Obama. The best man had once been special operations marine colonel.


And don't forget the poor woman who he "married" at this ceremony and all the guests that were conned by him too.

This man was obviously very good at what he did though - conning people - and I am guessing that you, me and many others could easily have fallen for his charm too if he can pull a stunt off as descibed in the article about his "wedding".

Tony Bennett wrote:

Kololi wrote:ONE: Why did Brian Kennedy sign a contract with this man?

Could it possibly because he was an expert at what he did i.e. conning people and Mr Kennedy was ermmm conned?? Or have I missed the point?

Yes, with respect, you have totally missed the point.

Does a ruthless and vastly successful businessman like Brian Kennedy suddenly fail to check someone out properly and get himself thoroughly deceived by a con-man? Does he sign legally binding contracts and then hand over hundreds of thousands of 'readies' to a bloke like Halligen?

I doubt it.

It's all very well to blame Metodo 3 and Halligen now. But Kennedy made the decisions to appoint them.

Don't forget that Marcos Aragao Correia (the man who claimed he'd been informed by underworld sources that Madeleine had been absucted, raped, killed and thrown into a lake, then admitted lying and said he'd had a vision of Madeleine being strangled the night after his first Spiritualist Church meeting in Madeira) claimed he was paid by Metodo 3 i.e. by Brian Kennedy to...

a) conduct a search of the Arade Dam for Madeleine's body in the full glare of news cameras

and

b) pursue Goncalo Amaral in the courts until, to quote Correia himself, 'The target was hit'.

Kennedy knew what he was doing in appointing Halligen.

A very valid point, a shrewd (sp) businessman like BK simply do not hire the guy without first vetting him .. considering it involved mega-buck from the Funds pooled from taxpayers.

Question is: it was Mccanns' daughter who is missing, yet it was down to BK, a mere unrelated in anyway supporter who got his hands dirty in the search, and him who decides how to spend the fund.
The mccanns indifference as to how the fund was spent and lack of interest in the search is v. telling. The search is part of the charade is so patently obvious.

Halligen contract was with BK, but paymaster was the Fund. Was the money paid directly to Halligen or via BK? No prize for guessing who Halligen sent his reports to I suppose?

What about the rumour of money laundering?

How Mitchell must rue the day he adopted such a Gournayan attitude with regard to Halligen's misdemeanours.

When one takes the line of 'laissez faire et laissez passer, le monde va de lui même or let do and let pass, the world goes on by itself, one should ensure they have at least a tenth of the influence that Gournay enjoyed.

Being the McCanns spokesperson, it would have best befitted Mitchell to express a little fury and outrage towards Halligen upon hearing of his arrest. After all, it is the McCanns who have made and continue to make constant appeals to the public for donations to their strange Fund. Did Mitchell not consider at the time that the public may one day demand to know why their hard-earned money ended up lining the pockets of swindlers and cheats?

Judge Mental wrote:How Mitchell must rue the day he adopted such a Gournayan attitude with regard to Halligen's misdemeanours.

When one takes the line of 'Laissez faire et laissez passer, le monde va de lui même' or 'Let do and let pass, the world goes on by itself', one should ensure they have at least a tenth of the influence that Gournay enjoyed.

Being the McCanns spokesperson, it would have best befitted Mitchell to express a little fury and outrage towards Halligen upon hearing of his arrest. After all, it is the McCanns who have made and continue to make constant appeals to the public for donations to their strange Fund. Did Mitchell not consider at the time that the public may one day demand to know why their hard-earned money ended up lining the pockets of swindlers and cheats?

We are in learned company, MiLord.

But for us peasants who are not savants, effortlessly quoting the literati without so much as a blink, a click on Wikipedia provides a degree of enlightenment about Gournay:

In economics, laissez-faire (English pronunciation: [You must be registered and logged in to see this link.] ([You must be registered and logged in to see this image.] [You must be registered and logged in to see this link.]), French: [You must be registered and logged in to see this link.] ([You must be registered and logged in to see this image.] [You must be registered and logged in to see this link.])) means allowing industry to be free from [You must be registered and logged in to see this link.] intervention, especially restrictions in the form of tariffs and government monopolies.
The phrase is [You must be registered and logged in to see this link.] and literally means "let do", but it broadly implies "let it be", or "leave it alone."

Laissez faire, telle devrait être la devise de toute puissance publique, depuis que le monde est civilisé ... Détestable principe que celui de ne vouloir grandir que par l'abaissement de nos voisins! Il n'y a que la méchanceté et la malignité du coeur de satisfaites dans ce principe, et l’intérêt y est opposé. Laissez faire, morbleu! Laissez faire!!
(Laissez faire, this should be the motto of all public power, since the world is civilized ... Detestable principle that will not grow through the lowering of our neighbors! Only malice and malignity of heart satisfied in principle and interest is opposed. Leave it, damn it! Laissez faire!)

According to historical myths, the phrase stems from a meeting in about 1680 between the powerful French finance minister [You must be registered and logged in to see this link.] and a group of French businessmen led by a certain M. Le Gendre. When the eager [You must be registered and logged in to see this link.] minister asked how the French state could be of service to the merchants, Le Gendre replied simply "Laissez-nous faire" ("Leave us be", lit. "Let us do").^{[You must be registered and logged in to see this link.]}

The laissez faire slogan was popularised by [You must be registered and logged in to see this link.], a French intendant of commerce in the 1750s. Gournay was an ardent proponent of the removal of restrictions on trade and the deregulation of industry and economic prosperity in France. Gournay was delighted by the LeGendre anecdote, and forged it into a larger maxim all his own: "Laissez faire et laissez passer" ('Let do and let pass'). His motto has also been identified as the longer "Laissez faire et laissez passer, le monde va de lui même!" ("Let do and let pass, the world goes on by itself!"). Although Gournay left no written tracts on his economic policy ideas, he had immense personal influence on the thinking of his contemporaries, notably the [You must be registered and logged in to see this link.], who credit both the laissez-faire slogan and doctrine to Gournay.^{[You must be registered and logged in to see this link.]}

That's the chappie!

The idea of laissez faire derives from Enlightenment notions that society is composed of selfish and competing individuals who, in meeting their own self-interest, improve the world around for themselves.

Kololi wrote:ONE: Why did Brian Kennedy sign a contract with this man?


Could it possibly because he was an expert at what he did i.e. conning people and Mr Kennedy was ermmm conned?? Or have I missed the point?

And aren't you a jolly old Mr Bennett, all this singing - so pleasant that it's making me want to hum aolong too. I shall have Old Michael Finnigan on my brain for hours now.

I just thought the very same...cheers Tony

Judge Mental wrote:That's the chappie!

The idea of laissez faire derives from Enlightenment notions that society is composed of selfish and competing individuals who, in meeting their own self-interest, improve the world around for themselves.

Snigger.

Gordon Bennett ( no pun intended )
how is a comprehensiv kid from a now famous place in Northumberland supposed to keep up [You must be registered and logged in to see this image.] laser this and laser that

KeirSimmonsITV has tweeted that the court case wasn't yesterday - now going to be on 18th August

Whilst we have Halligen on home ground, would it not be prudent for Portuguese officers in the company of British police officers, to glean as much information regarding his work on the McCann case?

Kevin #Halligen, extradition judgement @ Supreme Court - hand down date 23rd May 2012 #McCanns #fraud #moneylaundering

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JD I checked the SC pages and the judgement appears to say they grant an appeal? Too legalise for me. It said also he is a British citizen, I think Clouseau posted something about how can an English court extradite an Irish person.
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