'ROGUE OF THE DAY'
The Complete Mystery of Madeleine McCann™ :: Research and Analysis :: Maddie Case - important information
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Re: 'ROGUE OF THE DAY'
The perfect person to send out at great cost when a child is missing?Clarence Mitchell in his own words, on 29 September 2007 to Espresso: “I was the head of the government's Media Monitoring Unit. Forty people work there and their function is to control what comes out in the media."
Clarence Mitchell... what is that smell?
Guest- Guest
Re: 'ROGUE OF THE DAY'
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Julian Peribanez
Metodo 3 detective, seen in this short video clip shielding his face as he tours the streets of Praia da Luz in company with his boss, Brian Kennedy, who we see later in the clip walking down a street in Praia da Luz with his son, Patrick, who is now owner of the Cheshire-based property empire, Patrick Properties:
He appears to have been one of the Metodo 3 men employed simply to promote false ‘sightings’ of Madeleine. He was also employed in interviewing the ‘Jensen’ sisters, whose subsequent witness statements looked pretty dubious, to put it mildly.
In 2011 he was arrested and remanded in custody for taking an active role in placing illegal recording equipment on tables of a Barcelona restaurant patronised by Barcelona’s political elite. When a selection of these tapes were leaked, they caused huge embarrassment to leading Catalonian politicians, and a media and political storm followed. In the wake of this mayhem, Metodo 3 finally collapsed and went into administration.
Here’s a video of Peribanez giving an intereview on Spanish TV about Metodo 3:
Mind you, Peribanez redeemed himself a bit. He confessed his crime of illegally taping conversations, shopped his fellow Metodo 3 conspirators and was dealt with lightly.
He then wrote up a book dishing the dirt on the inside story of Metodo 3. One chapter dealt with their work on the Madeleine McCann case. The Madeleine Foundation paid for a professional translation of it, and I placed it exclusively on CMOMM last year, here:
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A wise man once said: "Be careful who you let on your ship,
because some people will sink the whole ship just because they can't be The Captain."
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Re: 'ROGUE OF THE DAY'
Clarence Mitchell continued
A perfect example of the fuction of a master media manipulator - by it's own admission..
Clarence Mitchell's Powerpoint Presentation - The IIR PR Congress 2009 5th year, held in November 2009 at The Monarch Hotel in Dubai.
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I tried yesterday to post the complete presentation but being from the mccannfiles (acknowledgement Nigel Moore) I couldn't make it happen. However, thanks to Pamalam it can be viewed in all it's glory here..
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A perfect example of the fuction of a master media manipulator - by it's own admission..
Clarence Mitchell's Powerpoint Presentation - The IIR PR Congress 2009 5th year, held in November 2009 at The Monarch Hotel in Dubai.
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I tried yesterday to post the complete presentation but being from the mccannfiles (acknowledgement Nigel Moore) I couldn't make it happen. However, thanks to Pamalam it can be viewed in all it's glory here..
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Re: 'ROGUE OF THE DAY'
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Brian Kennedy
Brian Kennedy is a very successful businessman, accumulating a personal fortune worth around £250 million. He owns a villa in Barcelona, where he once said he spends half the year, and lives in the magnificent Swettenham Hall near Congleton.
There have been some question marks about his business practices. Some of these were set out in these two links
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Then there was his controversial takeover of the ground of Stockport County Football Club, in order to promote his beloved rugby club, Sale Sharks. Under his watch, Stockport County F.C. began a terminal decline, and now lie several divisions lower in the Football Leagues.
But none of this really qualifies him as a ‘rogue’.
His Wikipedia entry is kind to him:
“Kennedy has supported charitable causes. He is the founder of the eponymous Brian Kennedy Trust, which makes charitable donations and takes up philanthropic causes in the UK. The Trust was set up in 2008, and with groups including the Cheshire police and Space4autism. He has also worked with the family of Madeleine McCann to try to find her after her disappearance in 2007”.
And it’s that part of his career that entitles him to today’s place in ‘Rogue of the Day’. Let’s look at his record in ‘trying to find Madeleine’:
1 Appointed the dodgiest detective agency in Catalonia, Metodo 3 - based in Barcelona, where he has his palatial villa - to ‘look for Madeleine’
2 Appointed lying Portuguese lawyer Marco Aragao Correia to search for Madeleine’s bones in the Arade Dam, and then to run a criminal prosecution against Gonçalo Amaral for alleged torture and allegedly filing a false report, on behalf of convicted murderess Leonor Cipriano, who killed her own daughter with the help of her brother, and then claimed she’d been abducted
3 Worked closely with lying Metodo 3 boss Francisco Marco, who openly boasted that his men knew Madeleine was alive, knew where she was being held, that his men were ‘closing in her’, and that Maddie would be ‘home by Christmas. Marco gets a dishonourable mention in this video by the way on his appearance in the Barcelona criminal courts:
4 Even after these blatant lies, continued to employ Metodo 3 for at least another 15 months
5 Worked closely with Metodo 3 detective Antonio Giminez Raso, himself a rogue who left his work as a Detective Inspector for the Catalonia Regional Drugs Squad under a cloud. In February 2008 Giminez Raso was arrested and spent four years in jail awaiting trial on charges of theft of cocaine and corrupt conduct as a police officer. He had attached himself to a 27-strong, very violent, drugs gang
6 Appointed the con-man and criminal Kevin Halligen to ‘look for Madeleine’ and paid him over £500,000 whilst most of the time he was swanning around Europe and the USA with his equally high-living girlfriend, Shirin Trachiotis. Halligen was paid out of funds generously given by the British public to the Find Madeleine Fund
7 Appointed Henri Exton, ex-Head of the Covert Intelligence Unit at MI5, to draw up two e-fits, supposed to be of one man, but which looked completely different from each other. Months earlier (December 2007) he had signed up Martin Smith to join the McCann campaign and it seems that Smith and other family members were prepared to agree that Exton’s efits were the man the police should be looking for. Funny that, as Smith said he only saw the man’s face in the dark for a second or two and then told police in May 2007 that he’d never be able to recognise the man if he ever saw him again
8 Got his friend Andrew Dickman to set up a never-used domain name for ALPHAIG, a fictitious company created to give the false impression that Dave Edgar and Arthur Cowley were heading up a long-established detective agency known as Alpha Investigations Group.
Let’s hope that one day Brian Kennedy will have to fully account to someone for these egregious actions.
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A wise man once said: "Be careful who you let on your ship,
because some people will sink the whole ship just because they can't be The Captain."
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Re: 'ROGUE OF THE DAY'
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Lord Timothy Bell
The wealthy owner of prestigious PR company Bell Pottinger.
Bell Pottinger prostitutes itself to some of the most disgusting regimes on the planet, such as the Democratic Republic of the Congo, raking in tens of millions for giving positive publicity to this cruel, odious, oppressive regime.
( More reports about Bell Pottinger’s support for this evil regime here):
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Tony Bennett witnessed a demonstration against Bell Pottinger on 24 March 2015 and took these pics on the way to hand some documents in to the offices of Carter Ruck:
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Other oppressive regimes from which Lord Bell’s company has made millions include Belarus (Byelorussia) and Uzbekistan.
Wikipedia also records that he “successfully lobbied on behalf of the Saudi Arabian government to discontinue the UK’s Serious Fraud Office investigation into alleged bribes in the Al Yamamah arms deal”. What a hero!
In the McCann case, he sent his subsidiary company Resonate to Praia da Luz days before Madeleine was reported missing.
On Friday 4 May he sent out his ‘Head of Risk’, Alex Woolfall (who will feature in ‘Rogue of the Day’ later), who seems to have spent most of his time deleting, editing and cropping images from the McCanns’ SD memory card before downloading them onto a CD, thus helping to deny the PJ access to the original memory cards.
Finally, the greedy git took £500,000 of public money donated by the British public to the Find Madeleine Fund to enrich himself and his company for ‘keeping the McCanns on the front page’ for one year. Good for the McCanns. But it didn’t help to find Madeleine.
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A wise man once said: "Be careful who you let on your ship,
because some people will sink the whole ship just because they can't be The Captain."
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Re: 'ROGUE OF THE DAY'
I've just seen this posted up by sharonl way back in July 2011..
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Rebekah Brooks - does she warrant a place in the rogues gallery? I think yes!
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Rebekah Brooks - does she warrant a place in the rogues gallery? I think yes!
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Re: 'ROGUE OF THE DAY'
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Detective Superintendent Stuart Prior
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D/Supt Stuart Prior of Leicestershire Police was the Investigating Officer on the Madeleine McCann case, in theory tasked with ‘assisting the Portuguese Police’ with their investigation.
In reality, the opposite was the case. The evidence is that he hindered them.
So what’s Detective Superintendent Prior’s main claim to fame - or notoriety - in this case?
A major event in the unfolding campaign of the McCann Team was the generation of the ‘Monsterman’, or ‘George Harrison man’ story in the News of the World on 20 January 2008.
There is no doubt that the creation of the ‘Monsterman’ story for News of the World readers was weeks in the planning. Despite the falling circulation of nearly all newspapers in the U.K., the News of the World in 2008 still had millions of Sunday readers - and a front-page story such as this one would have huge impact, as this one certainly did.
The lead-up to the publication of this story seems to have included the following elements:
The McCanns’ friend Jane Tanner said that on 3 May 2007 at around 9.15pm she saw a swarthy, olive-skinned man, dressed in a dark jacket and mustard chinos, about 5' 7" to 5' 9", carrying away a child. She admitted on the record that she did not see his face.
Ten days later, on 13 May 2007, she saw Robert Murat pass by a police van she was secreted in. She adamantly told the police: ‘That's the man I saw 10 days ago, I can tell by the way he is walking’.
In October 2007, nearly six months after Madeleine had been reported missing (and therefore of minimal practical value), the McCann Team released to the public an artist’s sketch, drawn by ‘FBI-trained’ artist Melissa Little, based on Jane Tanner’s claimed recollections.
A lady called Gail Cooper also claimed to have seen a ‘suspicious man’ lurking around Praia da Luz on up to three occasions (her accounts of the number of times she had seen this man varied, however).
In October 2007, Brian Kennedy, the Cheshire-based double glazing magnate, contacted Gail Cooper. He arranged for Melissa Little to prepare a sketch of the man Gail Cooper claimed to have seen. The sketch was later dubbed ‘Monsterman’ or ‘George Harrison man’. The PJ later totally dismissed Gail Cooper’s evidence as it is inconsistent; her second statement contradicting her first.
As we’ve just seen, Melissa Little had already been used by Brian Kennedy and the McCann Team to create an artist’s sketch of the man Jane Tanner claimed to have seen on 3 May 2007, first published nearly six months after Madeleine McCann was reported missing.
Dr Gerald McCann has given us a description of the session where Melissa Little drew up ‘Monsterman. He said:
“Jane Tanner spent a full day with Melissa Little, a qualified Police Sketch Artist since 1986, to compile this likeness of the suspect".
Melissa met Gail Cooper in a separate session. After spending hours with both witnesses, Melissa Little states: ‘There are many similarities between Miss Tanner’s man and Gail’s. Tanner believes that there is an 80% likelihood that this is the same man she saw carrying away the child, believed to be Madeleine'.
Gail Cooper confirmed that Brian Kennedy had ‘sent Melissa Little down’ to her for the day and she also criticised a draft article in the News of the World for falsely embellishing her account of events.
On Sunday 13 January 2008, Brian Kennedy visited Albert Schuurmans of the Roscoe Foundation in Portugal in connection with the story that he and the McCann Team wished to promote.
On Wednesday 16 January 2008, three days after Brian Kennedy’s interview with Albert Schuurmans, Dr Gerald McCann emailed Superintendent Stuart Prior of Leicestershire Police with a PowerPoint presentation about ‘Monsterman’ (the e-mail is Folio 3966 in the Portuguese Police files), with the briefest of covering notes saying: ‘As discussed’.
Just one hour later Superintendent Prior forwarded the package to Ricardo Paiva of the Portuguese Police, asking for instructions and stating, among other things:
“The PowerPoint attached (Folio 3968) was completed by the McCanns, but the statements were all taken by the U.K. police. Miss Tanner’s description was taken from the press and from the summary of her statement. There is some urgency around this as we need to decide prior to the Gail Cooper artist’s impression appearing in the U.K. press. How are you going to deal with the possible press issues? What are you planning around Mr Kennedy and the private investigation firm?…I will need to get back to the McCanns as he [Dr Gerald McCann] has asked to be updated. How would Paulo [Mr Rebelo] want this conducted and what information I am to provide to them? They [the McCann Team] are very excited about this potential lead”.
The main burden of Dr Gerald McCann’s ‘Powerpoint’ slides was to try to highlight the alleged similarity between Jane Tanner’s ‘bundleman’ and the ‘Monsterman/George Harrison man’ of Gail Cooper.
On 17 January 2008 (the very next day), Detective Constable 4168 of the Leicestershire Police interviewed Gail Cooper and e-mailed the Operational Task Force. He noted at the time that Mrs Cooper was trying to explain why the News of the World had added to and embellished her police statements, by saying: “It never crossed my mind” that they would do so. The Officer also reported that she “mentioned a man called Brian Kennedy who was working for the McCanns and...had sent an artist down to do a sketch of the man she saw at the villa” (Police files: Folio 4005).
On 18 January 2008, Superintendent Stuart Prior of Leicestershire Police emailed Ricardo Paiva about the Gail Cooper statement, writing: “As discussed, I have given Gerry a brief update just saying that the other descriptions are different to the artist’s impressions completed by Gail and identified by Jane [Tanner]. That the witnesses appeared genuine which indicates a number of charity collectors in the area prior to Madeleine being taken. We have not spoken to Jane at all and will not share our files with anybody, except yourselves, unless you request this from us. It appears there were at least three charity collectors if not more in the area in the weeks before Madeleine being taken. I am told that the artist’s impression by Gail Cooper is likely to hit the press over the weekend and I will update you on the effects of this next week, although we are not involved in this in any way at all”.
On 20 January the News of the World front page story re Madeleine appeared. The News of the World concluded: “The sketch by qualified police artist Melissa Little bears an uncanny resemblance to an earlier picture, based on Miss Tanner's story”.
On 21 January: Clarence Mitchell held a ‘Crimewatch’-style press conference at which he held up Melissa Little’s artist’s sketch of ‘Monsterman’.
Jane Tanner originally [13 May 2007] identified Robert Murat, from a police van, as the man she said she’d seen carrying a child on 3 May; however, the artists’ sketch of Tannerman she approved in November 2007 looked nothing like Murat. She admitted that she had never seen the man’s face, yet now felt able to declare that ‘Monsterman’ resembled the man (‘with 80% similarity’) she claimed to have seen originally.
It was a farce.
It was a farce that Detective Superintendent Stuart Prior willingly colluded in.
He willingly co-operated with the agenda of the McCanns to promote the abduction tale in the mass media, on the back of the highly dubious evidence of both Jane Tanner and Gail Cooper, which the Portuguese police rightly rejected as laden with contradictions.
He willingly co-operated with Rupert Murdoch’s News of the World to help them sell shedloads more newspapers and advertising space as a result of their front-page splash on 20 January 2008.
Prior was sent out to Praia da Luz on Day One and was no doubt a key member of that secret, top-level cabal set up by government security services under his boss, Matt Baggott, as early as Tuesday 8 May 2007.
He acted as the poodle of the McCanns and their PR machine, headed by government ‘Media Monitoring’ stooge, Clarence Mitchell. Like a lap-dog, he pleaded to the McCanns and their Tapas 7 friends: ‘Call me Stu’.
His actions show a total lack of professionalism and independence, and if the man has any integrity at all, I can’t see it - based on his actions in the Madeleine McCann case.
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A wise man once said: "Be careful who you let on your ship,
because some people will sink the whole ship just because they can't be The Captain."
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Re: 'ROGUE OF THE DAY'
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Rogue solicitor with Rogue NHS doctor outside the D. Pedro Palace hotel in Lisbon
Edward SmethurstRogue solicitor with Rogue NHS doctor outside the D. Pedro Palace hotel in Lisbon
Freemason [You must be registered and logged in to see this link.], who has holidayed in Praia da Luz every year since 1999, reportedly first became involved in the Madeleine McCann case by virtue of a telephone call he made to the McCanns on 12 September 2007, offering the help of Brian Kennedy, for whom Smethurst worked at the time. There are reasons for thinking that he may have become involved much earlier.
Amazingly, having allegedly made that initial ’phone call on 12 September, just two days later he was given the impressive title of ‘The McCanns’ Co-ordinating Solicitor’, a title he has proudly retained for the past 10 years. Two years later (2009) he became a Director of the Find Madeleine Fund, a post he has held for the past eight years.
Is he a rogue?
Edward Smethurst is a litigious solicitor, so we must be very careful.
We’d better just confine ourselves to reproducing this remarkable county court judgment in the Liverpool County Court. Smethurst had commissioned a water exploration company and water engineers, J P Whitter, to drill a bore hole for water beneath one of his many palatial properties in the Ashworth Valley area between Rochdale and Bury. But he didn’t make the contract with them direct, he did so via his longstanding business partner and builder, Richard Lear. When the job was finished, Edward Smethurst didn’t pay up. He argued that J P Whitter’s dispute was with his builder friend, Richard Lear, not him. With that very brief background in mind, without further ado let us reproduce the remarkable court judgment:
- Spoiler:
QUOTE:
IN THE LIVERPOOL COUNTY COURT Claim No. 1LV50009
35 Vernon Street
Liverpool
Wednesday, 18th July 2012
Before:
HIS HONOUR JUDGE PLATTS
Between:
J. P. WHITTER (W.E.) LTD,
Claimant
-v-
RICHARD LEAR
Defendant
___________________
Counsel for the Claimant: MR. TOM GOSLING
Counsel for the Defendant: MR. LOUIS DOYLE
___________________
JUDGMENT APPROVED BY THE COURT
Transcribed from the Official Recording by AVR Transcription Ltd
Turton Suite, Paragon Business Park, Chorley New Road, Horwich, Bolton, BL6 6HG
Telephone: 01204 693645 - Fax 01204 693669
Number of Folios: 88
Number of Words: 6,333
[ AVR 01204 693645 HMC16560/lh A B C D E F G H ]
APPROVED JUDGMENT
1. THE JUDGE: This is the trial of a preliminary issue ordered by His Honour Judge Bird on 12th March 2012, the issues being twofold; (1) whether there was a contract between the claimant and the defendant, and, (2) if so, the terms of any such contract.
2. The background is as follows. The claimant company operates as water engineers and has done so for some 40 years. Its business includes drilling boreholes to provide water supply to domestic premises. Its founding Director is John Whitter, who has given evidence before me. The defendant is a self-employed builder of nearly 40 years experience, who over the past ten to 15 years has been regularly engaged by a Mr Smethurst to carry out building works to various properties of his. The action relates to the provision of a borehole and water supply at Black Dad Farm, Ashworth Road, Rochdale, a property which Mr Smethurst was renovating. Mr Smethurst is a practising solicitor but in addition he carries on business as a property developer and owns a number of properties; he was unable in evidence to be precise as to how many. Over the years he has built up a good working relationship with the defendant, Mr Lear, and I am satisfied that there was a good deal of mutual trust between the two. In the main Mr Lear was paid £90 a day at the time for the work which he did for Mr Smethurst, plus the cost of materials.
3. It was in 2008 or maybe before that Mr Smethurst decided that as part of renovation he wanted a borehole to be drilled to provide a water supply to the house. There is no issue between the parties that in late 2008 the claimant company was approached to give a quote for the work. There was a telephone call to the claimant which took place on 5th November, although there is an issue as to whether the defendant or Mr Smethurst made that call, but there is no issue that on the following day, on 6th November, Mr Whitter, on behalf of the claimant company, attended at the farm where he met with Mr Lear for about 45 minutes or one hour. There are a number of issues as to what happened at that meeting but those are matters to which I will return.
4. There is then no issue that on 29th April 2010 the defendant, Mr Lear, signed a document which the claimant alleges was an acceptance of a quotation that had been delivered following the meeting on 6th November. That document is at page 81 of the bundle and has formed the central part of this case. There is thereafter no issue that in June 2010 the claimant company attended and carried out work at the property, drilling eventually to a depth of about 109 metres. However, during the carrying out of that work
and subsequently a number of disputes have arisen both as to what was agreed between the parties, who the parties to the contract are and in relation to the quality of the work carried out by the claimant. By the invoice dated 31st March 2011 the claimant company claimed payment for the work in the sum of £15,273.24. That sum included the cost of a site visit which was undertaken after the dispute had arisen. In a particulars of claim issued on 5th September 2011 the claimant claims the cost of the work only without the site visit, that is £14,613.24.
5. By his amended defence the defendant denies that the contract was with him. He accepts that he signed the document at page 81 but he denies that he thereby entered into a binding agreement. Alternatively, he alleges that he signed it believing that it was merely an authorisation to start work on the contract rather than an acceptance of a quote. He, therefore, relies upon the defence of non est factum and suggests that he did not intend to create legal relations with the claimant. It is against that background that His Honour Judge Bird ordered the preliminary issues which are before me.
6. It is right to note in passing that there is other litigation to which I have been referred. Sometime in early 2011 the claimant issued a claim form claiming the invoice amount from Mr Smethurst. Those proceedings were never effectively served and, therefore, lapsed. The claimant says that it had not taken legal advice at the time those proceedings were issued. Secondly, in these proceedings, at a time when Mr Smethurst was acting as the defendant’s solicitor, a counterclaim was raised effectively claiming Mr Smethurst’s own losses. Again, after legal advice that counterclaim was dropped but recently Mr Smethurst has issued proceedings in his own right claiming damages for personal injuries against the claimant company on the grounds that the water was contaminated and he, and in particular his family, were affected. Those proceedings are not before me.
7. It has been apparent during the evidence that there are a number of disputes of fact between the parties and before I go to resolve those disputes of fact and make findings I say a word about the witnesses who have given evidence. Mr Rudd was the first witness. He took the call on behalf of the claimant on 5th November 2011. He was a straightforward witness whose evidence really does not advance the case significantly either way.
8. Mr Whitter gave evidence. He was, I have to say, a very blunt witness. He gave his evidence in a straightforward manner. His answers were short and to the point, and on the whole I found him to be a credible and reliable witness. He has 40 years experience in the business and of this type of work, which, in my judgment, is of some importance.
9. His daughter, Sally Whitter, gave evidence. She was equally straightforward both in her evidence and, I find, in her dealings with Mr Smethurst once the difficulties arose on the contract. I found her to be plausible with a good recollection of the events she was asked to deal with, even if that memory was assisted at times by the exchange of emails which took place between her and Mr Smethurst.
10. Mr Lear is a builder and I have no doubt he was honest and doing his best to assist the court. He is to an extent, it seems to me, stuck in the middle of a dispute between the claimant and Mr Smethurst but there is no doubt that he signed the document which is alleged to be the contractual document in this case and I am sure that in doing so he was doing his best to help Mr Smethurst. I find, however, that his recollection of detail was less convincing than that of the claimant’s witnesses, and on the important points in issue where there are differences between his evidence and that of Mr Whitter and indeed Miss Whitter I prefer the evidence of the latter two to that of Mr Lear.
11. I have to say that I found Mr Smethurst to be a much more difficult witness. He was unable, it seemed to me, to give a straightforward answer to a direct question. This was partly because of his character but I did during the course of his evidence gain the impression that another part of the reason was that he was attempting to avoid answering difficult questions that were put. A feature of his evidence was that he frequently made reference to what he called “contemporaneous emails” in support of his stance when in fact those emails to which he was referring were written and sent over 18 months after the events he was being asked about. When being asked about events in November 2008 he repeatedly referred to emails written in June 2010. There were also a number of inconsistencies in his evidence and on occasions his explanations I found unsatisfactory and unconvincing. His evidence is, of course, central to the case since he claims that the claimant’s contract was with him and he accepts that he is now liable to pay the claimant, subject, of course, to setting off any claim he has against the claimant. However, it seems to me surprising that, despite his profession as a solicitor, he has no notes of any conversations that he now relies upon, and indeed the fact that many of the conversations, although of central importance to his position, were not raised until very late in this litigation. The detail of his evidence on the fundamental concepts of offer and acceptance was, in my judgment, wholly lacking. I will deal more with the specifics as I go through the findings but on the whole I have to say I was not impressed with Mr Smethurst as a witness of fact and find his evidence difficult to accept unless it accords with other evidence in the case.
12. I turn now to the issues of fact, going through them in chronological order. I have to start with events in 2007 since, although this evidence was not produced until the morning of the hearing (that is the emails sent by Mr Smethurst) I do accept on the balance of probabilities that Mr Smethurst did telephone the claimant company in September 2007 asking for an estimate of the likely costs of drilling a borehole at the farm and installing a water system. His email to a friend dated 5th September 2007 says, “They [that is the claimants] are talking about £8,000 plus value added tax”. This was not a quote, let alone an offer, in my judgment. It was merely an indication of the type of costs that might be involved. Mr Whitter accepted in his evidence that such a conversation may well have taken place since many customers are unaware of what the level of costs are likely to be involving this type of work.
13. The next important point in the chronology is evidence again given by Mr Smethurst in an alleged telephone conversation between him and the claimant company before 5th and 6th November call and meetings. In that telephone call Mr Smethurst alleges he was given a fixed price quote for the drilling of a borehole and the provision of a water supply to the farm, that quote being £8,600 plus value added tax. I reject Mr Smethurst’s evidence about that for a number of reasons. First, this telephone call, although it is alleged to be the offer which Mr Smethurst says he subsequently accepted, has never been mentioned before he gave evidence in the witness box. It was not referred to in any of the pre-litigation correspondence, some of which he wrote acting as Mr Lear’s solicitor, it is not a call mentioned in his witness statement, nor is it pleaded as part of the defendant’s defence. Indeed the fact of that call was not put to the claimant’s witnesses. Mr Smethurst’s evidence was that he spoke to a man in his 30s (that was his estimate from his voice on the telephone, it seems) but it was never explored with the claimant’s witnesses whether there was such a man or whether such a man had authority to give fixed price quotes over the telephone, and as such they have not been able to comment. The court is left with the feeling that this part of Mr Smethurst’s evidence was something of a late afterthought.
14. The second reason I reject that is that it is inconsistent with his witness statement, in particular paragraphs 8 to 10, the effect of which, in my judgment, is that the quote he was then saying was in fact made to Mr Lear at the meeting on 6th November 2011. It may be that in altering his evidence to introduce that telephone call Mr Smethurst was attempting to bring his evidence more in line with that of Mr Lear, who said that the fixed price had been agreed before the meeting on the 6th and that there was no quote given to him given at that meeting.
15. Third, I found that the explanation of paragraph 10 of his witness statement where he says that there was an agreed price at the meeting of 6th November of £8,600 plus VAT, was unconvincing. What he said was that he intended to convey was that this was a reference to Mr Lear having told him about the offer of a commission of five per cent discount, being around £400, which he then mathematically calculated to be in accordance with what he says he had been told earlier. In my judgment that explanation of paragraph 10 of his witness statement was contrived and unconvincing.
16. Fourth, and importantly I accept the evidence of Mr and Miss Whitter that the claimant as a company do not and never have given fixed price quotes for this type of work. It may well be that some firms do and it may well be that that is Mr Smethurst’s subsequent experience and that some firms themselves accept the risk of the drilling having to go deeper. But I am satisfied that the claimant as a company does not take that risk as a matter of policy. Mr Whitter’s evidence on this point was compelling. He said, “No one on this earth knows how far you are going to have to drill”, and it seems to me, having heard Mr Whitter, that he would not give or authorise a quote without a site visit when details of the access, the equipment required and the position of the hole are wholly unknown.
17. Finally, if there had been such a conversation and quotation given, as Mr Smethurst sought to allege, I would have expected some record of it, even if not from Mr Smethurst, whose profession as a solicitor does not seem to have taught him the lesson of making contemporaneous notes, but at least from the claimant, who would have needed such a record of such a quote for its own records. There is no record of such. So all in all I am quite unable to accept the evidence of Mr Smethurst about that early telephone conversation and early quote.
18. I am quite satisfied, however, therefore, that all Mr Smethurst knew before the meeting on 6th November 2011 was that the claimant had given an estimate of around £8,000 in 2008 and, putting the best light on it for Mr Smethurst, it seems maybe that in the absence of any notes he may have confused this communication with the claimant for another communication which he might have had with another supplier.
19. There is no doubt that there was a telephone call on 5th November 2011. Mr Rudd received the call and made a note of it. His note is brief, merely refers to Richard Lear, gives a mobile telephone number and the address of the farm where the work is to take place. Mr Rudd believes that the call was made by Mr Lear because his recollection was that the person who made the call suggested that he was a builder. There is no note of that in fact and, having heard Mr Lear’s evidence on this point, I accept what he says about it. I accept that he did not arrange the meeting and on the balance of probabilities I accept that it was Mr Smethurst who arranged the meeting, but, as I said, at that point no quote had been provided.
20. The meeting on 6th November: That it took place is accepted. There was a general discussion between Mr Lear and Mr Whitter. I accept that Mr Lear and Mr Whitter probably got on as a pair and I accept there may have been discussion of the likely depth of the borehole, which Mr Whitter estimated as probably going to be around 60 metres based on his previous local experience. However, Mr Lear agreed, and I find, that there was no discussion at that meeting of the price or indeed of a quote and, therefore, I reject the suggestion implied by Mr Smethurst in his witness statement that an oral quote was given at that meeting. Again, I accept Mr Whitter’s evidence that it would not be his practice to give such a quote. In common with other tradesmen he wanted to go back to the office to price the job up and then prepare a written quote and I am satisfied that that is what occurred. I also accept Mr Whitter’s evidence that he offered a main contractor’s discount to Mr Lear. It was clear to Mr Whitter that Mr Lear was not the owner of the building. He had been the point of contact, he had shown Mr Whitter around the site and clearly had extensive involvement with the renovations. Mr Lear gave him his address for communication purposes. In those circumstances I am satisfied that Mr Whitter did believe and reasonably believed that Mr Lear was a main contractor. I am not persuaded that Mr Lear told him that he was only a builder or labourer. I found Mr Lear’s evidence on this to be somewhat revealing. He said that he was aware from Mr Smethurst that other quotes had been given in the region of £8,600 and it was on that basis that Mr Whitter had said, “We do offer a five per cent fee which we pay direct to yourself”. He then went on to say, “Which I took as being by way of personal cheque or cash”. That was, as I took Mr Lear’s evidence, his understanding of how it would be paid. There was mention of the sum of £530, which was five per cent of £8,600. I am wholly unpersuaded that this was anything other than what Mr Whitter said it was. Indeed initially it seems that Mr Smethurst was content to go along with it given that Mr Lear was apparently prepared to pass that discount on to him. It would have made the overall price for him as the ultimate customer cheaper.
21. I have no hesitation in accepting the evidence of Mr Whitter that after that meeting he went back to the office and prepared the quote which was typed out by his daughter, Sally. I am satisfied on the balance of probability that that quote was sent to Mr Lear. It is addressed to his address and I find was probably received by him. I find that probably he gave it directly to Mr Smethurst and has, not surprisingly, now forgotten about it. I reach that conclusion because when, some 16 months later, he telephoned the claimant to find out when the work was to start Miss Whitter wrote a note, a contemporaneous note of that conversation. She had written this:
“Richard Lear rang to check if the quote still okay. Told him, ‘Yes’. He will get his client to check if he still has the quote and, if so, sign and send the form back. (inaudible) book(?) in all ready to go in the meantime.”
I accept that that is an accurate record of the conversation and it is of note that Mr Lear did not complain when asked to send back the last page signed. He did not say, “What quote are you talking about?”, or, “I’ve never received a quote”, but, rather, he said that he will get the client, Mr Smethurst, to check if he still had it. Later, it is apparent that he told Miss Whitter that he could not find it and so it was resent and that, again, is more consistent with the quotation having been received in the first place but having been lost.
22. I find, therefore, that the allegation that the quote was never received by Mr Lear does not fit well with these notes. Further, I find that it was the only basis upon which the defendant or Mr Smethurst could have accepted a quote. There had never been any previous quotation or any previous offer to be accepted and the quote which would, when sent, constitute the offer which was made to Mr Lear to enter into a contract. I am not persuaded that Mr Smethurst orally accepted a quote two weeks later. I do accept on balance that he probably telephoned somebody in the claimant company two weeks later in an attempt to negotiate a lower price, he having seen the quote which had been sent. It seems to me that such a negotiation is in his nature as a businessman and I do not find it to be unusual. I accept that he was told that there was to be no negotiation but I find that that is as far as it went. In my judgment there had never been any offer of a fixed price. It may be that Mr Smethurst had not read the quotation fully, I do not know, but there having been no offer of a fixed price there was and could be no acceptance of such an offer. So I reject the contention that a contract was concluded at that stage between Mr Smethurst and the claimant. Again, Mr Smethurst’s evidence on this point I found to be vague and unsatisfactory.
23. Nothing then happened for some period of time. So far as the claimant was concerned there was nothing to do. There was no contract and nothing for it to pursue. I am not persuaded that there was any further contact between either Mr Smethurst and Mr Lear on the one part and the claimant until March 2010 and the first call, I find, was that of 2nd March 2010, that being the one to which I have referred when Mr Lear asks if the quote is still okay. I accept that during that call and the subsequent call on 27th April Mr Lear was told by Miss Whitter that work could not commence until the signed quote was returned. I accept that Mr Lear may not have realised the significance of that and may and probably did think to himself that the signature was required merely as an authority to start the work. He may not have appreciated the potential contractual significance of the signature. However, what the claimant was really saying was that without the signed document there was effectively no order and, therefore, the claimant would not start work, and I do not find that Miss Whitter in any way attempted to mislead Mr Lear in relation to this. I am satisfied that she explained the position clearly to him but Mr Lear probably did not fully understand what she was saying.
24. Mr Lear maintains that when the copy quotation was sent only one page was sent. I am afraid on this I find that his recollection is flawed. I am satisfied on the balance of probability that the four-page quote was sent. It seems to me highly unlikely that Miss Whitter would print only one page and send effectively the final page of a four-page document. In relation to this point I found Mr Smethurst’s evidence to be wholly inconsistent and, frankly, lacking credibility. In his evidence to me he accepted that he had seen the signed document, probably on the day it was sent back to the clamant. I find it astonishing, therefore, that he says to me that he thought it was a start notice. I read the document. It is from the claimant. It is addressed to Mr Lear. It has his phone number. It then has a quote date of 7th November 2008, a quote reference 7/11/19031, and then these words:
“I would like to accept the above quotation to carry out the works in the sinking of a water supply borehole at Black Dad Farm, Ashworth Road, Rochdale.”
It is signed by Richard Lear. It is astonishing that a qualified practising solicitor could read that to be a start note and it is astonishing that he did not think to query the reference to the dated and numbered quote which he says he had never received and never seen. To say, as he said to me, it looked completely innocuous, in my judgment, does not seem to accord with reality. In my judgment his assertion in his witness statement, which he adopted in his evidence-in-chief, that the document he saw had a price on it which was consistent with what he had previously been told is probably a reference to the price on page three of the four-page quote, that is £8,600 plus VAT, and that was consistent with the estimate he had been given back in 2007, and indeed with the quote that he had unsuccessfully tried to renegotiate in 2008. The fact that he said in his initial evidence in his witness statement that he saw that figure suggests to me, and I find on the balance of probabilities, that the whole four-page document was sent and the whole four-page document was seen by Mr Smethurst. Further and importantly I accept the evidence of Miss Whitter on this point, which I found convincing, when she said that all the document was sent to Mr Lear.
25. There is no issue that the defendant, Mr Lear, signed the last page and returned it. I accept that he did not read the document and he probably did not read that page. I accept that as a builder he relied on Miss Whitter saying that it had to be signed before the work could start. That was true. Without it there was no order but, in my judgment, he misunderstood the contractual position. Had he read that page it was clear that his signature and the return of the document amounted to an acceptance of a quote and that that signature and return concluded an agreement between him and the claimant.
26. There is then a series of emails between the parties concerning the commencement of work and during its continuance. The work commenced on 17th June 2010. By 21st June the drilling had reached a depth of 60 metres. No water had been found and the claimant’s driller invited Mr Lear to sign an authorisation to continue working deeper, the quotation having been to an initial depth of 60 metres. Mr Lear refused. Mr Smethurst came on site on that day and he too refused to sign the authorisation. However, the evidence is that Miss Whitter authorised further drilling to the driller and the borehole was drilled to a depth of 108 metres and water supply was eventually made.
27. There was then, again, a flurry of emails between Miss Whitter and Mr Smethurst. I do not go through that in any detail but I pick out two parts to which reference has been made. Firstly, on 28th June 2010 in response to Miss Whitter’s email asking for a signed copy of authorisation to drill deeper ex post facto as it were, after the work had been done, Mr Smethurst replies as follows:
“We are due to move in next week and still have no water. We ordered our borehole over eight months ago and have repeatedly been let down as to promised installation dates.”
So clearly he is unhappy with the situation so far as the claimant was concerned. He goes on:
“(inaudible) we do not want to fall out as life is just too short. I am also prepared to pay you a fair amount for any additional depth genuinely drilled. I want, however, to know exactly what additional depth you are proposing to charge me for and how we can independently verify that depth.”
In my judgment that evidence is important. He was not at that stage suggesting that there was a fixed price contract. He was clearly not happy that the claimed depth had been drilled but he was offering to pay a fair price so long as it could be established that a depth over 60 metres had been drilled. That, in my judgment, is inconsistent with the case he now puts forward in his evidence.
28. The email exchange went on. The next one that I refer to is one again from Mr Smethurst dated 1st October 2010. By then the heat of the initial dispute had settled but there was continuing communication between the parties. In that email of 1st October Mr Smethurst wrote the following, paragraph 1:
“No contract was entered into between your organisation and myself. Instead you claim to have obtained the signature of one of my builders to your standard terms and conditions which incorrectly spells my builder’s name and incorrectly states his addresses. At all times you were aware that the customer for the water supply would be myself. However, no direct contract [and I accept Mr Smethurst’s evidence that the word ‘contact’ should read ‘contract’] has ever been entered into between yourselves and myself.”
I am invited to and have read the remainder of that email and all the other email correspondence and I accept Mr Smethurst’s evidence that what he was intending to say was that there was no written contract containing the terms and conditions of the quotation, but he did not say that and I find it extremely surprising for a solicitor with experience in commercial litigation to have worded it in this way. Either it is very badly worded or Mr Smethurst at that point was still not clear as to the true contractual position. I think the latter may well be true and it is only as the litigation has advanced further that he has thought to rationalise his position and, doing that, rationalise his evidence.
29. Those are my findings on the issues of fact. I take into account that the claimant originally sought to sue Mr Smethurst but I accept Miss Whitter’s explanation as to that. It was a step taken without legal advice and against the background that Mr Smethurst was at that stage accepting responsibility to make payment for the work. At that stage, so far as the claimant was concerned, it did not matter who the money came from so long as it received it. It was only when legal advice was taken that the true position was analysed. So, on the face of it the defendant has accepted a quotation and thereby created a binding contract.
30. I now turn to the two defences which are pleaded to suggest that that contract is not binding upon him. First, that he did not intend to create legal relations. It has been accepted by the parties that in the case of ordinary commercial transactions it is normally not necessary to prove that the parties to an express agreement in fact intended to create legal relations and the onus of proving that there was no such intention is on the party who asserts that no legal effect is intended and indeed that the onus is a heavy one. I am referred in particular to paragraph 2.161 of Chitty on Contracts, Volume One which starts with this sentence, “In deciding issues of contractual intention the courts normally apply an objective test”, and I am satisfied that that sentence accurately sets out the law which I have to apply in this particular case. Against that background I have absolutely no hesitation whatsoever in finding that there was objectively an intention to create legal relations on the part of Mr Lear. He clearly knew that the document was important since it had to be signed for the work to start. He was not misled as to its contents. His failure to appreciate what it was has to be said was due either to his own inattention to the detail and perhaps, combined with that, his naivety. In my judgment he never expressly or impliedly negatived that intention. The plain fact is that he signed a document which bound him to the contract and, in my judgment, in circumstances such that there was a clear intention to create legal relations.
31. The second defence is the plea of non est factum, namely that Mr Lear was not aware of the nature or character of the document which he signed, again thinking it was a start notice rather than an acceptance of a quotation. Again, I refer to Chitty as a convenient way of summarising the law, which is not really in dispute. At paragraph 5.106 of Volume One it starts with this sentence:
“A person who signs a document may not be permitted to raise the defence of non est factum where he has been guilty of negligence in appending his signature.”
In my judgment, for that reason the plea fails. I have no hesitation in finding that Mr Lear was negligent in appending his signature. He did not read the document before signing; he should have done. He is of full age and capacity and an experienced builder. It would be wholly unjust, in my judgment, for him to be able to resile from his signature on the grounds of his own failure to take any let alone any reasonable step to check what it was he was signing. Therefore, I have no hesitation whatsoever in issue number one in concluding that the contract is between the claimant and the defendant.
32. I move to deal with the second issue: what were the relevant terms? The starting point must be the terms were as contained in the quotation which was accepted. Therefore, the price of the work is to be calculated in accordance with that document. Beyond that it seems to me that I need to go to the pleaded cases to see what, if any, other terms which are in issue between the parties there were and then make a finding about those terms. Mr Boyle submitted that I should not make findings about each and every term but that the defendant should be permitted to argue at a later stage for the incorporation of terms during any subsequent hearing. I reject that as a proposition. The whole point of the trial of a preliminary issue is to resolve those identified issues so that the litigation can then proceed in the light of those findings. It would be contrary to the order of His Honour Judge Bird and indeed contrary to the overriding objective if a party were able to raise later in this litigation matters which had been resolved or should have been resolved in the trial of the preliminary issue.
33. In order to deal with this I must look at the amended defence. The relevant paragraphs seem to me to be these. Paragraph 3.3 deals with the offer of a five per cent discount to the contract price. I have already dealt with my findings in relation to that and there is no issue that if the claimant succeeds in this case then the quotation price should be reduced as a result of a five per cent main contractor’s discount and I find that to be a term of the contract.
34. The next relevant paragraph seems to me to be 4(a) which pleads:
“He had fitted other boreholes in the area and was confident based on his local knowledge that a plentiful supply of clean water would be found at a depth of 90 to 100 metres. Water extracted at such depths would be perfectly safe to drink and would not need further treatment as bacteria is not present at such depths.”
That is not in fact formally pleaded as a term of the agreement but it is raised as an issue and may well seek to be relied upon as a term of the agreement in due course. However, in reality there is no evidence from either Mr Smethurst or Mr Lear to support that suggestion so if it is sought to be argued that there was an implied or express term in relation to the quality of the water that would be supplied I find that that is not made out. The defendant has not brought evidence to support such a term and, therefore, I cannot find that such a term exists. In the light of evidence I have heard I find that there was no such term.
35. Paragraph 4(b) is dealt with in the findings that I have already made. The price and the cost of the work is in accordance with the quotation.
36. Paragraph 4(c) reads:
“The works will be carried out in a timely manner to allow Mr Smethurst to move into the property in May 2010.”
Again, there is no evidence that time was made the essence of the contract or indeed that it was ever agreed that the works should be completed by May 2010 and, therefore, I find that there is no term to this effect.
37. In relation to paragraph 11 there is pleaded an implied term that the claimant would exercise reasonable care and skill in carrying out its services. That is not in dispute and clearly was a term of the contract between the parties.
38. I hope that that deals with all the issues that arise in the two preliminary issues unless there is anything else I need to deal with.
(End of Judgment)
(Further discussions followed)
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A wise man once said: "Be careful who you let on your ship,
because some people will sink the whole ship just because they can't be The Captain."
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Re: 'ROGUE OF THE DAY'
Well, if they're going to they'd better hurry up while I've still got a leg to stand on.
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A wise man once said: "Be careful who you let on your ship,
because some people will sink the whole ship just because they can't be The Captain."
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Re: 'ROGUE OF THE DAY'
I think this David Edgar guy wants to be viewed with great suspicion. He is the person on record as saying "held in a hellish lair"Get'emGonçalo wrote:[You must be registered and logged in to see this link.]Ex Policeman, Dave Edgar: Maddie is in a secret lair in a lawless village in PDL
Dave Edgar
Cheshire resident Dave Edgar was a retired police Detective Inspector. The Cheshire businessman Brian Kennedy, who was responsible for managing the McCanns’ controversial private investigation, appointed him in November 2008 to lead the investigation. This followed the debacle of the previous investigation led by rogue and crook Kevin Halligen, who will appear on ‘Rogue of the Day’ before long. Edgar didn’t look for Madeleine but was paid to carry out his master’s directions. His initial task was to ‘beef up’ a TV documentary released by Channel 4 in May 2009, which simply regurgitated, uncritically, the McCanns’ claims that Madeleine had been abducted. He was wheeled out during the documentary to proclaim the McCanns ‘totally innocent’. When the documentary shed light on a major contradiction between two key witnesses, he calmly brushed this aside by saying: ‘You always get discrepancies when witnesses try to remember the same event’. Throughout his work for the McCanns, he was noted as promoting any old line that suited the moment. Thus, when the McCanns were promoting an especially unlikely story that Madeleine had been abducted by a Victoria Beckham-lookalike on a yacht bound for Australia, Edgar threw caution to the wind and calmly told a TV press conference: “The person seen by Jane Tanner on the night Madeleine disappeared might have been a woman, not a man”. At this point, his rapidly vanishing credibility slumped right down to zero.
thus alluding to paedophile groups. What is the source of this information and given that he is retired without any access to intelligence reports, how did he research / come by this information? Posing as a closet perchance? I hope that is not too close to the knuckle.
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Re: 'ROGUE OF THE DAY'
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"The British Priest staged everything"
Father Pacheco
In a sense, all Roman Catholic priests are rogues. They do not owe their loyalty to God, but to the Pope, the ‘Holy Father’. Most sinister of all, priests must carry out the practice of the ‘confessional’. Unlike other Christians who confess their sins directly to God, Roman Catholics are required, on a regular basis, to confess their sins to a priest in the confessional booth. This gives the priest a ‘hold’ over his flock. But far worse than that, successive Popes have decreed that even if Catholics confess the most serious of sins and crimes, these must ‘stay within the confessional’ and must never be disclosed to the police.
We know that Kate McCann disclosed ‘secrets’ to Father Pacheco.
We know that as the international media storm broke over the disappearance of Madeleine McCann, Father Pacheco fled from Praia da Luz and went to ground for three weeks.
During this period he disclosed that the McCanns had shared very personal things with him, but added (in line with Roman Catholic policy, and as McCann detective Arthur Cowley was to do four years later) that “I will take the McCanns’ secrets to my grave”.
This was an investigation into a missing 3-year-old girl. To keep anything secret which might be relevant, and might enable the mystery to be solved, gives him a well-deserved place on ‘Rogue of the Day’.
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Gonçalo Amaral: "The Priests also know very well what happened that night."
Translated by Joana Morais
McCann Case: 'The British Priest Staged Everything'
We went to Praia da Luz to speak with Father José Manuel – the priest of the local church – who accompanied all the sequence of events, lived after the disappearance of the English girl. Refuting all knowledge regarding the whereabouts of the blanket, the Father also denies the insinuations against his past.
Have you participated in all of the British community celebrations?
-In all.
And, specifically, you participated in religious acts for the girl Madeleine. Have you ever noticed in the existence of a pink blanket that belonged to the child?
- I participated, but I don’t know anything. The British priest, called by Madeleine parents, it was him who celebrated all the masses. In that context, the only thing that I could do for her was to pray. The other priest is the one who knows a lot – and he staged everything – it was him who made statements and who spoke to the PJ.
But, where could Maddie’s blanket be?
-It would be good to know, it’s possible that the other priest and the PJ know.
The PJ doesn’t know. Does that mean that they have ‘lost’ the evidence?
- I don’t know anything; I only know that, when everything was too ‘hot’, various stories were told, badly told and even more about me: that I was ‘exiled’ to the Vatican to speak with the Pope… Just because I missed 2 or three days, I was made an ‘exiled’.
Was it normal to hand out the church keys?
- It’s not me who decides. [silence]
There are some who have accused you of, when you where at the Gaia Seminary, having participated in act of harassment and sexual abuse.
- It’s all a lie; the media have nothing else to do. It is easy to attack the image of a priest. But, at this moment the defamers are being sued.
in Semanário Privado, 1 July 2009 - Paper Editon Only
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Re: 'ROGUE OF THE DAY'
Can some kind soul please lead me to the source of this information, I'm concerned as to it's authenticity - or at least the inference. I recall it being mentioned on CMoMM some while ago but can't locate anything using the forum search. There have been so many false alerts over the past 9+ years that, by word of mouth, are later accepted as fact. I think it wise to be cautious with every aspect before accepting anything as factual.Get'emGonçalo wrote:
In the McCann case, he sent his subsidiary company Resonate to Praia da Luz days before Madeleine was reported missing.
Thank you .
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Re: 'ROGUE OF THE DAY'
Hi Verdi, I got it from here:Verdi wrote:Can some kind soul please lead me to the source of this information, I'm concerned as to it's authenticity - or at least the inference. I recall it being mentioned on CMoMM some while ago but can't locate anything using the forum search. There have been so many false alerts over the past 9+ years that, by word of mouth, are later accepted as fact. I think it wise to be cautious with every aspect before accepting anything as factual.Get'emGonçalo wrote:
In the McCann case, he sent his subsidiary company Resonate to Praia da Luz days before Madeleine was reported missing.
Thank you .
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6. Evidence that an abduction hoax was planned over a period of four days
It follows from all that we have said above that, if Madeleine did indeed die on Sunday 29 April, those who knew she had died must have carefully planned an audacious hoax over a period of four days, so cunning and clever that most people still believe that she was abducted. Here, quite apart from the matters dealt with above, are several other specific indications that an abduction hoax was indeed planned over a four-day period:
A. The presence of the Director (and his deputy) of a Bell Pottinger subsidiary company - the PR company, Resonate - in Praia da Luz during the days before the alarm was raised
The relevant facts are these. Immediately following the reported disappearance of Madeleine, the holiday company who arranged the holiday, Mark Warner, brought their PR company, Bell Pottinger, to Praia da Luz. Its Head of Risk, Alex Woolfall flew there the very next day (4 May) and he was later joined by another top Director of the company. But it later emerged that the Director and his deputy from a Bell Pottinger subsidiary company, Resonate, had flown out to help Mark Warner just days before, possibly on Monday 30 April. No satisfactory explanation for this has ever been provided. Were they sent ahead of Bell Pottinger as a kind of advance party because something serious had already happened to Madeleine? (The McCanns incidentally paid the amazing sum of £500,000 to Bell Pottinger to keep Madeleine’s name on the front pages of Britain’s newspapers for a year. That money appears to have come from donations made by the general public.
I think it was either NickE or Doug D who brought it to our attention some months ago.
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A Mod writes: Verdi & all readers of 'Rogue of the Day' > The original source for this information is PRWeek, 9 May 2007, at this link:
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What is plain from this article is that although Resonate were sent out some days before Madeleine was reported missing, by the time the 'big guns' from Bell Pottinger arrived, Resonate were somehow effortlessly absorbed into the role of suddenly meeting with Ambassadors and senior Portuguese and British police officers. Mightily handy! Whether PRWeek has told us the full story about why Resonate was sent out early is a moot point.
It was indeed our Scandinavian researcher NickE who brought this important find to CMOMM'
There are many references to Michael Frohlich, the former Director of Resonate, on the net - Mod
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Re: 'ROGUE OF THE DAY'
Aha I see - much obliged!Get'emGonçalo wrote:Hi Verdi, I got it from here:Verdi wrote:Can some kind soul please lead me to the source of this information, I'm concerned as to it's authenticity - or at least the inference. I recall it being mentioned on CMoMM some while ago but can't locate anything using the forum search. There have been so many false alerts over the past 9+ years that, by word of mouth, are later accepted as fact. I think it wise to be cautious with every aspect before accepting anything as factual.Get'emGonçalo wrote:
In the McCann case, he sent his subsidiary company Resonate to Praia da Luz days before Madeleine was reported missing.
Thank you .
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6. Evidence that an abduction hoax was planned over a period of four days
It follows from all that we have said above that, if Madeleine did indeed die on Sunday 29 April, those who knew she had died must have carefully planned an audacious hoax over a period of four days, so cunning and clever that most people still believe that she was abducted. Here, quite apart from the matters dealt with above, are several other specific indications that an abduction hoax was indeed planned over a four-day period:
A. The presence of the Director (and his deputy) of a Bell Pottinger subsidiary company - the PR company, Resonate - in Praia da Luz during the days before the alarm was raised
The relevant facts are these. Immediately following the reported disappearance of Madeleine, the holiday company who arranged the holiday, Mark Warner, brought their PR company, Bell Pottinger, to Praia da Luz. Its Head of Risk, Alex Woolfall flew there the very next day (4 May) and he was later joined by another top Director of the company. But it later emerged that the Director and his deputy from a Bell Pottinger subsidiary company, Resonate, had flown out to help Mark Warner just days before, possibly on Monday 30 April. No satisfactory explanation for this has ever been provided. Were they sent ahead of Bell Pottinger as a kind of advance party because something serious had already happened to Madeleine? (The McCanns incidentally paid the amazing sum of £500,000 to Bell Pottinger to keep Madeleine’s name on the front pages of Britain’s newspapers for a year. That money appears to have come from donations made by the general public.
I think it was either NickE or Doug D who brought it to our attention some months ago.
Perhaps when next online NickE or Doug D (or whoever else) would be so kind as to identify their source of information. It was probably said at the time but I can't remember.
Apologies for disrupting the thread, although it's not a bad thing to give the link you provided another plug . Resonate or no Resonate, he's still a rogue.
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Re: 'ROGUE OF THE DAY'
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Alex Woolfall, the McCann's first spokesman
Alex Woolfall
Alex Woolfall, on the day Madeleine McCann was reported missing, had a very important, and very well-paid job. He was the Head of Risk at that contemptible PR agency, Bell Pottinger, that makes money out of promoting some of the most disgusting and oppressive regimes in the world. They also skimmed a cool £500,000 - half a million - from the Find Madeleine Fund, just for ‘keeping the McCanns on the front page for a year’.
As ‘Head of Risk’, Woolfall’s job was to help clients identify risk, where possible prevent or minimise such risks, but if not - where actual risk had occurred - to eliminate it or minimise it.
One of the biggest risks for the McCanns was what was in their camera.
For from what we now know, an examination of it would have revealed four dated photographs of Madeleine from the holiday, three in the playground on the Saturday, afternoon, and one from Sunday lunchtime by the pool: the ‘Last Photo’. And after that…nothing.
Apart, that is, from one other photo that we know was on the McCanns’ camera, thanks to the sterling work done by Dr Martin Roberts in his article: ‘[You must be registered and logged in to see this link.]’, a ‘must read’ for anyone researching the Madeleine McCann case. In that article, Dr Roberts conclusively proves that on the morning of 3 May, Kate McCann not only washed Madeleine’s pyjamas, but also took a photograph of them. Amazingly, just five weeks later, they had the gall to hold up Madeleine’s pyjamas on a BBC Crimewatch programme (5 June) and a press conference in Amsterdam (7 June), pretending they were Amelie’s.
It must have been clear to Gerry McCann and Alex Wolfall that Something Had To Be Done about these embarrassing and incriminating photos.
The Portuguese police must never get their hands on the SD memory card from their camera.
As early as Friday 4 May, Alex Woolfall was on the plane to Praia da Luz. It was as if someone had told him two or three days beforehand: “You’ll be needed any day now. Pack your bags, and as soon as we call you, get on that plane to Faro”.
We know that as early as the following day (5 May), Alex Woolfall was sitting with the McCanns, going through all the images on their digital camera, and deleting, editing and cropping them. A carefully edited selection of these photos would be transferred to a computer disk, which the Portuguese police say was handed to them by Gerry McCann on Wednesday, 9 May.
An article in the Times reported:
“The McCanns had photographs of Madeleine on their digital camera, which Mr Woolfall began transferring to a laptop computer.
Woolfall said to Kate, “Let’s try to identify pictures where her face is visible”. Downloading the images was a very difficult process for them. It was upsetting.
"They were trying to do two things at once: one, emotionally deal with what was actually, really happening to them; two, operate in some sort of logical way to help get her back.".
“Mr Woolfall transmitted the photographs to the Press Association in London, from where they were distributed to the media. The portfolio included the now famous image of Madeleine wearing a hat on a tennis court.”
We know that the Last Photo was on the McCanns’ camera and almost certainly taken on the Sunday. So what did Alex Woolfall and Gerry McCann do with it? The suggestion is that someone, somewhere, altered the metadata to make it look as though the photo had been taken on Thursday 3 May. It was not published until 24 May, two days after Gerry McCann returned from a weekend in England.
Woolfall said he wanted the press to have good quality photos of Madeleine. Why didn’t he send the Press Association the Last Photo?
The Times article mentions the controversial ‘Tennis Balls Photo’. Was that on the McCanns’ camera? Since two different people claim to have taken it on three different dates, there must be some doubt about its authenticity. Probably Alex Woolfall is one of only two or three people who knows who really took the Tennis Balls Photo - and when.
The McCanns’ Canon camera was boldly placed on the McCanns’ living room table of their apartment, the night they reported Madeleine missing, as can be seen on the Portuguese police photos taken that night, and now in the PJ files. Had the McCanns already taken their SD memory card out of their camera? - and cunningly substituted another?
HideHo on her website made this pertinent observation on the Last Photo many years ago: “It is surely extraordinary that the 'Last Photo' of Madeleine, showing her full face, should not have been chosen for release at that time. Even if the photograph had been grainy and indistinct, its significance to the investigation, as [what was claimed to be] the last 'living' picture of Madeleine, cannot be overstated”.
Some would argue that Alex Woolfall was ‘only doing his job’ as Head of Risk.
Just, well, ‘obeying orders’.
Others might argue that in tampering with an SD memory card which should have been handed to the Portuguese police, he was actively perverting the course of justice.
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Re: 'ROGUE OF THE DAY'
May I suggest journalist Tony Parsons? Why is he so enamoured of the Mccanns, even laughably referring to them as 'the embodiment of parental love? What is his interest in this case?
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Re: 'ROGUE OF THE DAY'
I've done a write-up for him which I'll be posting this week.Cmaryholmes wrote:May I suggest journalist Tony Parsons? Why is he so enamoured of the Mccanns, even laughably referring to them as 'the embodiment of parental love? What is his interest in this case?
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Re: 'ROGUE OF THE DAY'
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Dr Joe Sullivan
Joe Sullivan seemed to pop up like a bad penny on the Madeleine McCann case.
Like dozens of others sent by HM Government security agencies, Bell Pottinger or the mainstream media, he was there in Praia da Luz when it really mattered. Right at the start.
This press article said:
“Highly respected forensic psychologist Dr Joe Sullivan arrived in Praia da Luz within days of Madeleine’s disappearance as part of a so-called ‘Cracker’ team, with Detective Chief Superintendent Graham Hill. He returned to the UK on 09 May 2007”.
OK. A few questions first. Who sent out this ‘Cracker’ team? Who else was on the team? And who said that Dr Joe Sullivan was a ‘respected forensic psychologist ‘. Oh, sorry. ‘Highly’ respected!
As in: ‘highly respected police inspector, DCI Redwood’?
Or ‘highly respected PR expert, Clarence Mitchell’?
‘Highly respected MP, cook and TV panelist, Sir Clement Freud’?
Or ‘highly respected criminologist, Mark Williams-Thomas’?
David Brown of The Times on Wednesday 9 May 2007, wrote up Sullivan’s early visit to Praia da Luz as follows:
- Spoiler:
Experts on tracing paedophiles fly out to boost search for girl
Two British experts on sex offenders arrived in Portugal yesterday to help in the hunt for the kidnapper of missing Madeleine McCann.
The forensic behavioural analysts from the Child Exploitation and Online Protection Centre, which combats paedophiles, were sent in response to a request from the Lisbon Government.
The Foreign and Commonwealth Office said that their arrival would ensure a range of experts was available to explore ‘every possible avenue’ that may have led to Madeleine’s disappearance.
One of the two British experts is the forensic psychologist Joe Sullivan. Mr Sullivan has helped police in Britain and Europe to investigate child sex murder, abduction, organised paedophile rings and underage internet pornography.
He formerly dealt with paedophile priests at the Lucy Faithfull Foundation, a child protection charity that strives to assess and treat abusers. He has published a study into professionals who abuse children. Its conclusions included the striking finding that one in seven paedophiles, including priests, admits choosing vocations to enjoy easy access to children.
Last night John Buck, the British Ambassador to Portugal, confirmed that British experts had arrived in addition to the three family liaison officers from Leicestershire Police.
Mr Buck also defended the actions of the Portuguese police, saying that they had to operate under the constraints of the country’s law.
He added: “I have been in touch closely over the last few days with the cabinet minister here in Portugal and the Prime Minister and Portuguese police. They all assure me that everything possible is being done to ensure the safe return of Madeleine.
“We continue to work closely with the Portuguese authorities. They are very pleased with the collaboration with the British authorities.
“They are in close touch with Interpol and Europol and I know Kate and Gerry, with whom I have just been speaking, are very grateful for their efforts.”
A British tourist claimed yesterday that two weeks ago she saw a man trying to steal a pushchair at the resort where Madeleine went missing.
Amanda Mills, 34, of Basildon, Essex, said that she reported the incident to police last week after reading about the girl’s disappearance. “It was late at night,” Mrs Mills said. “This guy came along and put his hands on a pushchair outside somebody’s apartment. He didn’t even look to see if there was a child in it.”
Portuguese police have told British officers that they believe the man who abducted Madeleine was a tourist from Britain or an expatriate linked to a network of paedophiles in the country.
Portugal is known to be a favoured destination for British paedophiles and the discovery in the early 1990s of a group of men who were abusing local boys helped to persuade the Government to make it illegal for Britons to have sex with underage children abroad.
Reports in Portugal have suggested that Madeleine, whose fourth birthday is on Saturday, had been “abducted for order”. The Correio da Manha said: “One of the most substantial possibilities that the Policia Judiciaria is investigating is that this was paid for and commissioned by a international paedophile, probably of British origin."
Specialist detectives from the sex abuse and homicide unit in Lisbon were dispatched to the holiday region yesterday to take charge of the investigation after growing criticism that the police had been slow to react and had failed to make progress in tracking the abductor.
Antonio Santana Carlos, the Portuguese Ambassador in London, said that police were doing all they could but had to abide by the country’s secrecy laws. He said: “They are doing their best in cooperation with Europol and Interpol. For the parents of Madeleine McCann, we respect their suffering but unfortunately the investigation has to carry on in secrecy as that is in accordance with our laws.” He added: “They have our understanding and we support them and we hope that soon there will be an end to their suffering.”
Detectives have now ruled out a kidnap for ransom. There is nothing in the family history to suspect a revenge motive.
A source close to the police investigation told the 24 Horas newspaper: “Were it a kidnapping [for money] it would not be rational for someone to take on an almost 4-year-old when they could take one of the infants. It could be a kidnapping for sexual ends but one cannot exclude the possibility of the child having walked out and got lost and having fallen in a stream or a well.”
Madeleine, from Rothley, near Leicester, disappeared when she was left with her brother and sister, 2-year-old twins Sean and Amelie, in a holiday flat. Her parents, Gerry and Kate, both 38, had been dining in a nearby restaurant and checking on them regularly.
Yesterday Mr McCann and his wife visited the Nossa Senhora da Luz (Our Lady of Light) Roman Catholic church, where they had taken Mass on Sunday, to pray privately for their daughter’s return. Mrs McCann, a GP, was again clutching the Cuddle Cat that Madeleine took to bed.
Colleagues of the couple were offering prayers at Glenfield Hospital, in Leicester. About 300 people met at the hospital, where Mr McCann is a consultant cardiologist, at 1pm.
Villagers in Rothley held a silent vigil yesterday in a show of solidarity with the family. People were encouraged to light a candle or to tie a red ribbon around railings at the war memorial on the village green.
John Terry, the England and Chelsea footballer, with his colleague Paulo Ferreira joined Cristiano Ronaldo, the Portuguese international and Manchester United player, in making an appeal.
Terry said: “We are urging anyone out there with any information at all – please, please, please come forward. It’s a terrible thing for her family to go through, she’s only young so please, please come forward.” Ferreira repeated the appeal in Portuguese.
Dr Sullivan was soon to get involved in more activity on behalf of the Madeleine McCann campaign.
An internet article pointed out: “He later helped in the production of, and personally narrated, the ‘A Minute for Madeleine’ campaign video; an appeal directly to the person keeping a ‘secret’ about Madeleine, ‘who knows who’s involved in her disappearance’ and who may have been groomed by the perpetrator(s) to stay quiet” He did this in close co-operation with his boss, Jim Gamble.
The internet article continued: “In January 2010, he shared a stage with Gerry McCann at the CEOP conference entitled: ‘Taken: Sexually-motivated child abductions’ – an event for law enforcement officers only. Gerry McCann, who according to the published agenda was due to deliver the closing speech, actually spoke earlier in the day and is then rumoured to have left (unconfirmed). Thus he would have missed the keynote speeches of both Dr Joe Sullivan and Detective Chief Superintendent Graham Hill, not to mention the closing question and answer session for all speakers.
It continued: “Just weeks before Madeleine McCann was reported missing, Dr Sullivan was a star act at a child sex abuse conference in, of all places, Washington D.C.”, where the Pizzagate scandal broke in November.
This conference was titled ‘Tackling Child Sex Abuse: A Challenge For All’, and held on 21 & 22 February 2007 at the Renaissance Mayflower Hotel, Sullivan was listed as:
Speaker: Joe Sullivan MA (Crim), BA (Hons), CQSW, Dip Psych --- Joe Sullivan is a recognised authority on this subject, now seconded to CEOP. He is an Honorary Lecturer in Forensic Psychology at the University of Birmingham. He has assisted police forces in the UK and in other European countries on major crime enquiries involving the sexual murder of children, child abduction, organised child crime abuse and the sexual abuse of children on the Internet”.
How handy that he had already been seconded to CEOP just nine weeks before the McCanns went for their fateful holiday in Praia da Luz.
Even more interesting, Dr Joes Sullivan pops up yet again in an article on 23 April 2007 (five days before the McCanns went on holiday) by Brian Bethune, link here:
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The article was titled “The secret network of child predators”. For interest, I will add the whole article. Sullivan makes an appearance at the end of it. Here it is:
- Spoiler:
BRIAN BETHUNE
April 23, 2007
Pedophilia has exponentially worsened through communities of the like-minded.
In Britain, London police once arrested a photographer with 130,000 pornographic images of children. That was in 1874, a striking reminder from investigative journalist Julian Sher in his ‘One Child at a Time’ (Random House) that there have always been pedophiles among us.
Sher’s riveting account of online predators and their police pursuers also cites a famous survey of 200 male undergraduates in California in which one in five admitted to some kind of sexual attraction to small children, while almost one in 10 reported having sexual fantasies about them. Seven per cent said they might even have sex with a child if they could avoid detection and punishment. In Canada, Dr. John Bradford of the Royal Ottawa Hospital’s Sexual Behaviours Clinic estimates that two to seven per cent of the population could have pedophiliac tendencies.
Pedophiles are thus scattered across society: well off or poor, tortured with guilt or enthusiastic participants, involved in functioning sexual relationships with other adults or complete loners.
Their prevalence means that up to 20 per cent of adults were molested as children in some manner. And not by strangers: up to 90 per cent of victims suffer at the hands of relatives or others they know well. For all we don’t know about pedophilia, though, there is one evermore manifest fact. Just as it has proved for millions of ordinary people, the Internet has become for pedophiles the greatest empowering tool ever created. Which means, according to Sher, that what has always been part of the human condition is now growing exponentially worse, “both in magnitude and in severity.”
The Internet “doesn’t create pedophilia,” Sher notes, “but it certainly does fuel it.” In the past, pedophiles were isolated, repressed by the revulsion most people felt toward them and limited in their opportunities. “But now offender after offender will tell you about their eureka moment,” says Sher, “when they first went online and saw not only the images - the live images - available, but immersed themselves in the acceptance, the assurance they were among like-minded people.”
The Net has vastly increased the money-making possibilities of child pornography, and hence the supply on offer. In the late 1990s, Thomas and Janice Reedy, a Dallas couple who never earned enough to own a home, were parking his and hers Mercedes in their mansion driveway. Their money came from Landslide, an Internet portal that offered credit-card customers access to 5,000 porn sites. Business limped along at first, Thomas Reedy later confessed, until he realised where the real money was. In the first month of offering access to a site called Child Rape, the Reedys garnered 1,277 registrations, and over the next two years Landslide brought in more than $10 million.
More insidiously, the Internet doesn’t just make access easier, it facilitates supply: the Washington-based National Center for Missing and Exploited Children now finds that as much as 10 per cent of their seized material comes from older children who have taken compromising pictures of themselves. More often than not these self-made images were the result of what NCMEC calls “online enticement” - children manipulated by a “friend” met on the Web who coaxed them into snapping pictures of their own bodies. In a U.S. Justice Department survey, one in seven young Web surfers reported encountering unwanted sexual material or online harassment.
Worst of all, adds Sher, “the Internet drags in those who probably wouldn’t have done what they did otherwise.” Canadians will need no further reminder of that than the case of Michael Briere. In his confession to the rape and murder of 10-year-old Holly Jones, Briere told the court he had fantasised about molesting a girl for “maybe a year or two.” He kept alive what he called his “dark secret” on the Web: “The more I saw it, the more I longed for it in my heart.” On the night of May 12, 2003, “I viewed some material beforehand. I just got excited. I really wanted to do it. I really wanted to have sex with a child. I just came out of my place and she was just there.” Forty minutes later Holly was dead.
Briere’s tipping point goes to the heart of the first and, to Sher, most important myth he wants to dispel with his book. “It’s not just pictures,” Sher says emphatically. “They’re crime-scene photos. But you still hear from people that ‘Better perverts look at dirty pictures than actually molest a child.’ Looking doesn’t deter doing; study after study shows that 35 to 40 per cent of those arrested for pornography possession are also hands-on abusers.” Another common misconception, according to Sher, is that many of the victims are already sexual beings - underaged only by law. In fact, fully 39 per cent of known victims, according to NCMEC, are only 5 or younger; 19 per cent are under 3.
We still don’t know much about the men - and most are men, although a tenth are women - responsible for this spiral of abuse, especially what we really want to know: the combination of brain chemistry, genetics and personal experience that makes them what they are. The nature vs. nurture argument, as so often, rages inconclusively around them. Much points to a hard-wired nature:
Sher cites British psychologist Joe Sullivan, who found that 80 per cent of offenders knew by age 18 that they were sexually attracted to children. On the other hand, 33 per cent of offenders were abused themselves as children, a rate statistically higher than the general population - fodder for the nurture side. Whatever the cause, the condition is incurable. “They know it doesn’t go away,” Sullivan says. “Once you’ve got it, you’ve got it.”
Going back to Sullivan’s close colleague and friend Jim Gamble, Gamble organised two conferences, in September 2013 and March 2014, with the peculiar title: 'Glimpse CSA'. The CSA stands for 'Child Sexual Abuse', so the somewhat bizarre title of these two conferences reads: "Glimpse Child Sexual Abuse". I am sure they could have thought up a better, more appropriate and suitable title.
These conferences had 5 keynote speakers; one was Gamble himself, while another was Dr Joe Sullivan, whose conference biography boasted that he was: "...CEOP's former Principal Forensic Physiologist, one of the foremost global experts on offender character and behaviour, the principal developer of the Behavioural Analysis Unit and adviser on major police enquiries including the Madeleine McCann investigation.
And what precisely did he achieve in that investigation? Precisely nothing.
Dr Joe Sullivan is currently Co-Director of Mentor Forensics, along with his co-partner Valerie Sheehan, link: [You must be registered and logged in to see this link.] He does a lot of work for the courts on child sexual abuse cases.
Valerie Sheehan, a Director of Mentor Forensic Services, was recently quoted as saying: “As online child abuse is a recent phenomenon, there is a lack of academic research in the area and subsequently, a number of ‘unhelpful’ preconceptions have taken root”.
Dr Joe Sullivan probably shouldn’t be in our ‘Rogue of the Day’ feature. It’s just that he has done everything possible to move along the fake abduction narrative, and hangs around Jim Gamble like a groupie. That’s all.
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Re: 'ROGUE OF THE DAY'
Graham Hill, is this the same who has a doctorate in criminology discussing the case on Americas Crime Time? either way many anomalies in his "account"Get'emGonçalo wrote:[You must be registered and logged in to see this link.]
Dr Joe Sullivan
Joe Sullivan seemed to pop up like a bad penny on the Madeleine McCann case.
Like dozens of others sent by HM Government security agencies, Bell Pottinger or the mainstream media, he was there in Praia da Luz when it really mattered. Right at the start.
This press article said:
“Highly respected forensic psychologist Dr Joe Sullivan arrived in Praia da Luz within days of Madeleine’s disappearance as part of a so-called ‘Cracker’ team, with Detective Chief Superintendent Graham Hill. He returned to the UK on 09 May 2007”.
OK. A few questions first. Who sent out this ‘Cracker’ team? Who else was on the team? And who said that Dr Joe Sullivan was a ‘respected forensic psychologist ‘. Oh, sorry. ‘Highly’ respected!
As in: ‘highly respected police inspector, DCI Redwood’?
Or ‘highly respected PR expert, Clarence Mitchell’?
‘Highly respected MP, cook and TV panelist, Sir Clement Freud’?
Or ‘highly respected criminologist, Mark Williams-Thomas’?
David Brown of The Times on Wednesday 9 May 2007, wrote up Sullivan’s early visit to Praia da Luz as follows:
- Spoiler:
Experts on tracing paedophiles fly out to boost search for girl
Two British experts on sex offenders arrived in Portugal yesterday to help in the hunt for the kidnapper of missing Madeleine McCann.
The forensic behavioural analysts from the Child Exploitation and Online Protection Centre, which combats paedophiles, were sent in response to a request from the Lisbon Government.
The Foreign and Commonwealth Office said that their arrival would ensure a range of experts was available to explore ‘every possible avenue’ that may have led to Madeleine’s disappearance.
One of the two British experts is the forensic psychologist Joe Sullivan. Mr Sullivan has helped police in Britain and Europe to investigate child sex murder, abduction, organised paedophile rings and underage internet pornography.
He formerly dealt with paedophile priests at the Lucy Faithfull Foundation, a child protection charity that strives to assess and treat abusers. He has published a study into professionals who abuse children. Its conclusions included the striking finding that one in seven paedophiles, including priests, admits choosing vocations to enjoy easy access to children.
Last night John Buck, the British Ambassador to Portugal, confirmed that British experts had arrived in addition to the three family liaison officers from Leicestershire Police.
Mr Buck also defended the actions of the Portuguese police, saying that they had to operate under the constraints of the country’s law.
He added: “I have been in touch closely over the last few days with the cabinet minister here in Portugal and the Prime Minister and Portuguese police. They all assure me that everything possible is being done to ensure the safe return of Madeleine.
“We continue to work closely with the Portuguese authorities. They are very pleased with the collaboration with the British authorities.
“They are in close touch with Interpol and Europol and I know Kate and Gerry, with whom I have just been speaking, are very grateful for their efforts.”
A British tourist claimed yesterday that two weeks ago she saw a man trying to steal a pushchair at the resort where Madeleine went missing.
Amanda Mills, 34, of Basildon, Essex, said that she reported the incident to police last week after reading about the girl’s disappearance. “It was late at night,” Mrs Mills said. “This guy came along and put his hands on a pushchair outside somebody’s apartment. He didn’t even look to see if there was a child in it.”
Portuguese police have told British officers that they believe the man who abducted Madeleine was a tourist from Britain or an expatriate linked to a network of paedophiles in the country.
Portugal is known to be a favoured destination for British paedophiles and the discovery in the early 1990s of a group of men who were abusing local boys helped to persuade the Government to make it illegal for Britons to have sex with underage children abroad.
Reports in Portugal have suggested that Madeleine, whose fourth birthday is on Saturday, had been “abducted for order”. The Correio da Manha said: “One of the most substantial possibilities that the Policia Judiciaria is investigating is that this was paid for and commissioned by a international paedophile, probably of British origin."
Specialist detectives from the sex abuse and homicide unit in Lisbon were dispatched to the holiday region yesterday to take charge of the investigation after growing criticism that the police had been slow to react and had failed to make progress in tracking the abductor.
Antonio Santana Carlos, the Portuguese Ambassador in London, said that police were doing all they could but had to abide by the country’s secrecy laws. He said: “They are doing their best in cooperation with Europol and Interpol. For the parents of Madeleine McCann, we respect their suffering but unfortunately the investigation has to carry on in secrecy as that is in accordance with our laws.” He added: “They have our understanding and we support them and we hope that soon there will be an end to their suffering.”
Detectives have now ruled out a kidnap for ransom. There is nothing in the family history to suspect a revenge motive.
A source close to the police investigation told the 24 Horas newspaper: “Were it a kidnapping [for money] it would not be rational for someone to take on an almost 4-year-old when they could take one of the infants. It could be a kidnapping for sexual ends but one cannot exclude the possibility of the child having walked out and got lost and having fallen in a stream or a well.”
Madeleine, from Rothley, near Leicester, disappeared when she was left with her brother and sister, 2-year-old twins Sean and Amelie, in a holiday flat. Her parents, Gerry and Kate, both 38, had been dining in a nearby restaurant and checking on them regularly.
Yesterday Mr McCann and his wife visited the Nossa Senhora da Luz (Our Lady of Light) Roman Catholic church, where they had taken Mass on Sunday, to pray privately for their daughter’s return. Mrs McCann, a GP, was again clutching the Cuddle Cat that Madeleine took to bed.
Colleagues of the couple were offering prayers at Glenfield Hospital, in Leicester. About 300 people met at the hospital, where Mr McCann is a consultant cardiologist, at 1pm.
Villagers in Rothley held a silent vigil yesterday in a show of solidarity with the family. People were encouraged to light a candle or to tie a red ribbon around railings at the war memorial on the village green.
John Terry, the England and Chelsea footballer, with his colleague Paulo Ferreira joined Cristiano Ronaldo, the Portuguese international and Manchester United player, in making an appeal.
Terry said: “We are urging anyone out there with any information at all – please, please, please come forward. It’s a terrible thing for her family to go through, she’s only young so please, please come forward.” Ferreira repeated the appeal in Portuguese.
Dr Sullivan was soon to get involved in more activity on behalf of the Madeleine McCann campaign.
An internet article pointed out: “He later helped in the production of, and personally narrated, the ‘A Minute for Madeleine’ campaign video; an appeal directly to the person keeping a ‘secret’ about Madeleine, ‘who knows who’s involved in her disappearance’ and who may have been groomed by the perpetrator(s) to stay quiet” He did this in close co-operation with his boss, Jim Gamble.
The internet article continued: “In January 2010, he shared a stage with Gerry McCann at the CEOP conference entitled: ‘Taken: Sexually-motivated child abductions’ – an event for law enforcement officers only. Gerry McCann, who according to the published agenda was due to deliver the closing speech, actually spoke earlier in the day and is then rumoured to have left (unconfirmed). Thus he would have missed the keynote speeches of both Dr Joe Sullivan and Detective Chief Superintendent Graham Hill, not to mention the closing question and answer session for all speakers.
It continued: “Just weeks before Madeleine McCann was reported missing, Dr Sullivan was a star act at a child sex abuse conference in, of all places, Washington D.C.”, where the Pizzagate scandal broke in November.
This conference was titled ‘Tackling Child Sex Abuse: A Challenge For All’, and held on 21 & 22 February 2007 at the Renaissance Mayflower Hotel, Sullivan was listed as:
Speaker: Joe Sullivan MA (Crim), BA (Hons), CQSW, Dip Psych --- Joe Sullivan is a recognised authority on this subject, now seconded to CEOP. He is an Honorary Lecturer in Forensic Psychology at the University of Birmingham. He has assisted police forces in the UK and in other European countries on major crime enquiries involving the sexual murder of children, child abduction, organised child crime abuse and the sexual abuse of children on the Internet”.
How handy that he had already been seconded to CEOP just nine weeks before the McCanns went for their fateful holiday in Praia da Luz.
Even more interesting, Dr Joes Sullivan pops up yet again in an article on 23 April 2007 (five days before the McCanns went on holiday) by Brian Bethune, link here:
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The article was titled “The secret network of child predators”. For interest, I will add the whole article. Sullivan makes an appearance at the end of it. Here it is:
- Spoiler:
BRIAN BETHUNE
April 23, 2007
Pedophilia has exponentially worsened through communities of the like-minded.
In Britain, London police once arrested a photographer with 130,000 pornographic images of children. That was in 1874, a striking reminder from investigative journalist Julian Sher in his ‘One Child at a Time’ (Random House) that there have always been pedophiles among us.
Sher’s riveting account of online predators and their police pursuers also cites a famous survey of 200 male undergraduates in California in which one in five admitted to some kind of sexual attraction to small children, while almost one in 10 reported having sexual fantasies about them. Seven per cent said they might even have sex with a child if they could avoid detection and punishment. In Canada, Dr. John Bradford of the Royal Ottawa Hospital’s Sexual Behaviours Clinic estimates that two to seven per cent of the population could have pedophiliac tendencies.
Pedophiles are thus scattered across society: well off or poor, tortured with guilt or enthusiastic participants, involved in functioning sexual relationships with other adults or complete loners.
Their prevalence means that up to 20 per cent of adults were molested as children in some manner. And not by strangers: up to 90 per cent of victims suffer at the hands of relatives or others they know well. For all we don’t know about pedophilia, though, there is one evermore manifest fact. Just as it has proved for millions of ordinary people, the Internet has become for pedophiles the greatest empowering tool ever created. Which means, according to Sher, that what has always been part of the human condition is now growing exponentially worse, “both in magnitude and in severity.”
The Internet “doesn’t create pedophilia,” Sher notes, “but it certainly does fuel it.” In the past, pedophiles were isolated, repressed by the revulsion most people felt toward them and limited in their opportunities. “But now offender after offender will tell you about their eureka moment,” says Sher, “when they first went online and saw not only the images - the live images - available, but immersed themselves in the acceptance, the assurance they were among like-minded people.”
The Net has vastly increased the money-making possibilities of child pornography, and hence the supply on offer. In the late 1990s, Thomas and Janice Reedy, a Dallas couple who never earned enough to own a home, were parking his and hers Mercedes in their mansion driveway. Their money came from Landslide, an Internet portal that offered credit-card customers access to 5,000 porn sites. Business limped along at first, Thomas Reedy later confessed, until he realised where the real money was. In the first month of offering access to a site called Child Rape, the Reedys garnered 1,277 registrations, and over the next two years Landslide brought in more than $10 million.
More insidiously, the Internet doesn’t just make access easier, it facilitates supply: the Washington-based National Center for Missing and Exploited Children now finds that as much as 10 per cent of their seized material comes from older children who have taken compromising pictures of themselves. More often than not these self-made images were the result of what NCMEC calls “online enticement” - children manipulated by a “friend” met on the Web who coaxed them into snapping pictures of their own bodies. In a U.S. Justice Department survey, one in seven young Web surfers reported encountering unwanted sexual material or online harassment.
Worst of all, adds Sher, “the Internet drags in those who probably wouldn’t have done what they did otherwise.” Canadians will need no further reminder of that than the case of Michael Briere. In his confession to the rape and murder of 10-year-old Holly Jones, Briere told the court he had fantasised about molesting a girl for “maybe a year or two.” He kept alive what he called his “dark secret” on the Web: “The more I saw it, the more I longed for it in my heart.” On the night of May 12, 2003, “I viewed some material beforehand. I just got excited. I really wanted to do it. I really wanted to have sex with a child. I just came out of my place and she was just there.” Forty minutes later Holly was dead.
Briere’s tipping point goes to the heart of the first and, to Sher, most important myth he wants to dispel with his book. “It’s not just pictures,” Sher says emphatically. “They’re crime-scene photos. But you still hear from people that ‘Better perverts look at dirty pictures than actually molest a child.’ Looking doesn’t deter doing; study after study shows that 35 to 40 per cent of those arrested for pornography possession are also hands-on abusers.” Another common misconception, according to Sher, is that many of the victims are already sexual beings - underaged only by law. In fact, fully 39 per cent of known victims, according to NCMEC, are only 5 or younger; 19 per cent are under 3.
We still don’t know much about the men - and most are men, although a tenth are women - responsible for this spiral of abuse, especially what we really want to know: the combination of brain chemistry, genetics and personal experience that makes them what they are. The nature vs. nurture argument, as so often, rages inconclusively around them. Much points to a hard-wired nature:
Sher cites British psychologist Joe Sullivan, who found that 80 per cent of offenders knew by age 18 that they were sexually attracted to children. On the other hand, 33 per cent of offenders were abused themselves as children, a rate statistically higher than the general population - fodder for the nurture side. Whatever the cause, the condition is incurable. “They know it doesn’t go away,” Sullivan says. “Once you’ve got it, you’ve got it.”
Going back to Sullivan’s close colleague and friend Jim Gamble, Gamble organised two conferences, in September 2013 and March 2014, with the peculiar title: 'Glimpse CSA'. The CSA stands for 'Child Sexual Abuse', so the somewhat bizarre title of these two conferences reads: "Glimpse Child Sexual Abuse". I am sure they could have thought up a better, more appropriate and suitable title.
These conferences had 5 keynote speakers; one was Gamble himself, while another was Dr Joe Sullivan, whose conference biography boasted that he was: "...CEOP's former Principal Forensic Physiologist, one of the foremost global experts on offender character and behaviour, the principal developer of the Behavioural Analysis Unit and adviser on major police enquiries including the Madeleine McCann investigation.
And what precisely did he achieve in that investigation? Precisely nothing.
Dr Joe Sullivan is currently Co-Director of Mentor Forensics, along with his co-partner Valerie Sheehan, link: [You must be registered and logged in to see this link.] He does a lot of work for the courts on child sexual abuse cases.
Valerie Sheehan, a Director of Mentor Forensic Services, was recently quoted as saying: “As online child abuse is a recent phenomenon, there is a lack of academic research in the area and subsequently, a number of ‘unhelpful’ preconceptions have taken root”.
Dr Joe Sullivan probably shouldn’t be in our ‘Rogue of the Day’ feature. It’s just that he has done everything possible to move along the fake abduction narrative, and hangs around Jim Gamble like a groupie. That’s all.[You must be registered and logged in to see this link.]
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Re: 'ROGUE OF THE DAY'
@ MayMuseMayMuse wrote:Graham Hill, is this the same who has a doctorate in criminology discussing the case on America's Crime Time? Either way many anomalies in his "account"Get'emGonçalo wrote:[You must be registered and logged in to see this link.]
Dr Joe Sullivan
Joe Sullivan seemed to pop up like a bad penny on the Madeleine McCann case...
Dr Joe Sullivan probably shouldn’t be in our ‘Rogue of the Day’ feature. It’s just that he has done everything possible to move along the fake abduction narrative, and hangs around Jim Gamble like a groupie. That’s all.[You must be registered and logged in to see this link.]
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Yes, good point. Here are some notes by way of reply:
------------------
We discussed Graham Hill on an earlier thread in 2015, soon after this video was released, here:
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My OP shows that I considered what he said 'balderdash'. I've not changed my view since.
On that previous thread is this short biographyof Graham Hill:
Dr Hill is a Criminologist, he is also a retired UK senior police officer and former head of Behaviour Analysis at the Child Exploitation Online Protection centre (CEOP) in London. His research interests include the behaviour of male and female child sex offenders, interviewing child sex offenders and male non-familial child abduction/murder.
We also had this timeline of his career:
1985–2011
Police Officer , Surrey Police
2000–2011
Senior Investigating Officer, Surrey Police
2007–2011
Head of Behaviour Analysis, Child Exploitation Online Protection centre (CEOP)
2011 – present
Independent Criminal Behaviour Analysis Consultant, KLIK Protective Services.
From the fact that his video interview on the U.S. crime show was in 2015, I think we may safely deduced the following:
1. He joined Surrey Police in 1985
2. After 15 years' service, he was promoted to 'Senior Investigating Officer'.
3. It will be reasonable to assume that between 2000 and 2011 he achieved promotion to the rank of Detective Chief Superintendent. This I think is a photo of him in uniform:
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4. In 2007, the same year Madeleine was reported missing, he was seconded to work with Jim Gamble at CEOP, whilst retaining his DCS rank at Surrey Police
5. At sometime since 2007, he has studied for a degree, or maybe two degres in Criminolgy, and is therefore now entitled to call himself 'Dr Graham Hill'.
So I conclude that Dr Graham Hill and Det Chief Supt Hill are indeed one and the same.
It's interesting to reflect on the very high degree of CEOP involvement in the early days:
Jim Gamble, CEOP Director - begs public for photos
Dr Joe Sullivan, CEOP Psychologist - sent ou to Praia da Luz on day One
Det Chief Supt Graham Hill, Head of Behavioural Analysis, CEOP - ditto.
Not forgetting Mark Williams-Thomas, worked alongside Graham Hill at Surrey Police, sent out to Praia da Luz almost immediately
And witchcraft-and-sex-obsessed Dr Ray Wyre, wrote articles in the Times and Telegraph days after Madeleine was reported missing, saying she must have been abducted by a paedophile, and...
lurking in his vlila in Praia da Luz, serial sex abuser Sir Clement Freud.
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Dr Martin Roberts: "The evidence is that these are the pjyamas Madeleine wore on holiday in Praia da Luz. They were photographed and the photo handed to a press agency, who released it on 8 May, as the search for Madeleine continued. The McCanns held up these same pyjamas at two press conferences on 5 & 7June 2007. How could Madeleine have been abducted?"
Amelie McCann (aged 2): "Maddie's jammies!".
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Re: 'ROGUE OF THE DAY'
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Martin Brunt
Martin Brunt is the Chief Crime Correspondent for SKY News. As such, he gets to cover all the major crime stories. And they don’t come much bigger than the disappearance of Madeleine McCann.
One little known fact about Martin Brunt is that prior to Madeleine McCann’s disappearance in May 2007, he had for many years owned a villa in the village.
It’s a curious place, Praia da Luz.
Serial sex abuser of women, Sir Clement Freud, also had a villa over there. Senior Freemason, Past Grand Master Edward Smethurst, the McCanns’ co-ordinating lawyer, has been holidaying in the village for the past 18 years. Martin Smith, with his strange tales of strangers who didn’t look like a tourist passing him down a dark alley, part-owns an apartment there. How could he tell in a second or two in the dark whether the bloke ‘looked like a tourist’ or not?
Another long-term resident of Praia da Luz, of course, was the mysterious Robert Murat. And here’s where we begin to get really interested in Martin Brunt, because we have in the PJ files two recorded conversations between Martin Brunt and Robert Murat, both on the same day - 15 May 2007 - the day after Murat was made an arguido.
These conversations are curious for a number of reasons. First, Brunt, Robert Murat and Jenny Murat, his mother, all seem very chummy-chummy on the ’phone.
JENNY MURAT: Hello. Residence of Jenny Murat.
MARTIN BRUNT: Hello, Martin Brunt speaking.
JENNY MURAT: Hi dear.
Did they perhaps all know each other well before May 2007?
Most interest centres around exactly why Martin Brunt was offering the services of SKY News’s lawyers to Murat. What was the motive for that? Who at SKY News authorised Brunt to make such an offer to Murat?
Even more interest centres around this little exchange at the end of the first Brunt-Murat conversation:
ROBERT MURAT: I never have any problem with making a statement.
MARTIN BRUNT: OK
ROBERT MURAT: I have no problem whilst...Whilst I have the legal cover to do so. Because I don’t want to end up in prison....(sigh)
MARTIN BRUNT: That would be the last thing we want.
ROBERT MURAT: Firstly, for something I did not do and secondly for something that would break their contract rules...
MARTIN BRUNT: I understand that and I understand the sensitive nature of everything that we have been working with since we arrived here, so...
Loads of questions jump out from the above exchanges.
For a start, Brunt talks about ‘since we arrived here’. He does not use ‘I’, but ‘we’. Who else is he referring to? When did ‘they’ arrive? It seems that Brunt and SKY News were there from Day One – Friday 4 May.
Next question: WHAT exactly had they both been ‘working with’?
But perhaps still more interest centres around Murat’s mention of ‘a contract’. It is clear from the context that this ‘contract’ must have a very close connection to the disappearance of Madeleine McCann and to his arrest.
“Break their contract rules”?
Whose contract rules exactly?
Could this be why Robert Murat spent so much time talking to his lawyer, Francisco Pagarete, after he suddenly flew over to Praia da Luz on Tuesday 1 May? Was Murat really - as he claimed - merely discussing his girlfriend Michaela’s divorce from Luis Antonia and the setting up of ‘Romigen’?
Maybe he was not talking to Pagarete about any of that. Maybe he was discussing a very important contract.
Could that contract have been to provide translation services after the abduction alarm was raised - and to find out all he could about the PJ investigation for certain people and if possible try to divert the PJ by coming up with a host of suggestions for lines of enquiry the PJ should pursue?
Because that’s exactly what he ended up doing - as discussed in Inspector Varanda’s complaint about Murat to Gonçalo Amaral.
Could that contract even have included moving the body of Madeleine McCann to a safe location? – after all, when first questioned by the PJ, Murat lied by not disclosing that he had visited a number of houses between Tuesday 1st and Thursday 3rd May. He had also clearly lied comprehensively about two meetings he attended on the Thursday, one several miles west of Praia da Luz, the other several miles east of Praia da Luz at the Palmeras Golf Club.
Did Brunt perhaps know the secret of this ‘contract’. It looks like he did. Using guarded language, no doubt aware that his call to Murat might be being recorded, he acknowledges that the ‘contract’ issue is ‘of a sensitive nature’.
If Brunt knew about Murat’s contract with whoever it was, that alone would qualify him as a rogue.
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But in September 2014 Brunt did something that in many people’s eyes makes him one of the biggest rogues ever to support the McCanns’ cause.
Because at the beginning of that month, he undoubtedly triggered, and was thus partly responsible for, the suicide of a fierce critic of the McCanns on the internet - Brenda Leyland.
By way of background, Brenda Leyland was a lonely divorcee, living alone. She had become interested in the Madeleine McCann case. She tweeted her criticisms of them repeatedly, most days. And she frequently used strong words, with a fair amount of swearing.
On 31 August 2014, Brunt was sent by the editor of SKY News to ‘doorstep’ Brenda Leyland.
We can be pretty sure that this was a set-up, carefully orchestrated by the McCanns and their supporters, and by the top brass in the Metropolitan Police, who had been handed a dossier of allegedly cruel and libelous tweets against the McCanns, tweeted by a number of people. Gerry McCann had publicly demanded that the police and the CPS make an example of such people and lock them up. But this attempt to make an example of someone ended up - thanks mainly to Martin Brunt – in the humiliating public exposure of a lonely, vulnerable divorcee, and her suicide three days later.
As can be seen in this short clip:
…Brunt catches her by surprise, just as she’s about to drive off and meet a friend for lunch. It is an ambush. He then frightens the life out of her by telling her: “You’ve been reported to the police…Scotland Yard are investigating your Twitter account…”
Brunt knew everything. He knew about the dossier .He knew the police had been informed and were looking at it.
Brenda Leyland knew none of this. Suddenly, she was told, by Martin Brunt with a cameramen, that she is under a criminal investigation. And not just by a local police force, but by ‘Scotland Yard’.
She must have been terrified, and spent that lunch with her friend in a state of extreme anxiety.
Brunt lay in wait for her until she came back from lunch. Brenda Leyland invited him back into her house. She told him frankly that she was already feeling suicidal.
But it was the might of the Murdoch-owned SKY News machine against one lonely, defenceless woman.
Despite telling Brunt that she felt like committing suicide, Brunt and SKY News had their news story and they had their victim. The next day, Wednesday 1 September, they positively revelled, triumphantly, in showing the clip of Brunt ambushing Brenda Leyland every 15 minutes throughout the day. The McCann Team and Scotland Yard were no doubt overjoyed that at last they had outed a nasty troll, who perhaps might be sent to jail.
But it didn’t work out like that.
Three days later Brenda Leyland was found dead, alone, on the floor of a room at the Marriott Hotel, Enderby, just a mile from Leicestershire Police headquarters. The Coroner found that she had committed suicide by administering helium gas.
A few weeks later, Scotland Yard quietly and shamefacedly admitted that there was nothing in the dossier that amounted to a criminal offence.
So, thanks to Martin Brunt, SKY News, the McCanns and their friends, and the might of the Metropolitan Police, Brenda Leyland was - literally - frightened to death, for nothing.
Brenda Leyland paid the price. She paid with her life.
When eventually the McCans ‘Hall of Shame’ is constructed, surely a large portrait of Martin Brunt will be given pride of place.
It would be good to hang him up, anyway.
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Brenda Leyland (1951 – 2014) with youngest son Ben
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Re: 'ROGUE OF THE DAY'
Well that's clear enough - thank you mods. So effectively it's a sort of no-news news, in so far as it was published by a PR journal - not Bell Pottinger per se.Get'emGonçalo wrote:I think it was either NickE or Doug D who brought it to our attention some months ago.
-----
A Mod writes: Verdi & all readers of 'Rogue of the Day' > The original source for this information is PRWeek, 9 May 2007, at this link:
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What is plain from this article is that although Resonate were sent out some days before Madeleine was reported missing, by the time the 'big guns' from Bell Pottinger arrived, Resonate were somehow effortlessly absorbed into the role of suddenly meeting with Ambassadors and senior Portuguese and British police officers. Mightily handy! Whether PRWeek has told us the full story about why Resonate was sent out early is a moot point.
It was indeed our Scandinavian researcher NickE who brought this important find to CMOMM'
There are many references to Michael Frohlich, the former Director of Resonate, on the net - Mod
This was my main area of concern about Resonates presence at Praia da Luz, early May 2007, being taken as read that they were called for a 'generic briefing' by Mark Warner in connection with Madeleine McCann's disappearance.
Resonates role in this saga, if any, is very uncertain and thus shouldn't be yet another innuendo to be taken as fact - at least not without confirmation that the staff did take on the role of liaison with all and sundry. It does seem a bit odd considering all the other assistance on hand in the very early days - they were there representing Mark Warners weren't they? I can understand Warners need for their PR heavies to jump to attention (perhaps not 'crisis management' - on the surface a bit far fetched) but not the parents of a missing child.
Best left on the back burner pending further information in my opinion.
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Re: 'ROGUE OF THE DAY'
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Tony Parsons
Tony Parsons is a loudmouth occasional journalist who knows virtually nothing about the disappearance of Madeleine McCann. Yet he made frequent comments about the case. He once hosted a series on Channel 4, appropriately called ‘Big Mouth’.
Wikipedia has a whole paragraph about ‘Tony Parsons and the Madeleine McCann case’. It says:
In 2007, Parsons wrote a series of articles about the disappearance of Madeleine McCann from a beach in the Algarve in Portugal, in the Daily Mail. The tone with which these articles were written was later described as having a "touch of arrogant xenophobia" by The Guardian's Marcel Berlins. The Press Complaints Commission that year received 485 complaints, a huge increase in the number of complaints in comparison to previous years, his article on the McCann affair receiving the most complaints.
In an article for the Daily Mirror in 2007, entitled "[You must be registered and logged in to see this link.]", he said of Portugal's ambassador to Britain, Senhor António Santana Carlos, "And I would respectfully suggest that in future, if you can't say something constructive about the disappearance of little Madeleine, then you just keep your stupid, sardine-munching mouth shut”.
His last major article appears to have been one he wrote for the Mirror on the sixth anniversary of Madeleine’s reported disappearance.
Here are his words:
“Yesterday was six years to the day that three-year-old Madeleine McCann disappeared from a holiday apartment in Portugal. ‘Please don’t forget about her’, says Madeleine’s mother Kate.
There is no chance of that, Kate. Madeleine McCann captured our imagination because in her smiling photographs, her tragic disappearance and in the unimaginable grief of her mother and father, every parent was confronted with their worst nightmare. Most parents know what it is like to briefly lose track of a child. In a store or on the beach – you look away and they are gone. You think they are with your partner, but they are not. And as you search you feel a sickness in your heart like nothing you have ever known. When our daughter was small, my wife and I lost track of her for 30 minutes after a ballet class. It was the longest - and worst - half hour of my life. I can’t pretend to imagine what Kate and Gerry McCann have been through. I can’t guess at what they endure every day of their lives. But I know we never will forget the smiling three-year-old who was so cruelly taken from her family. And I know that there but for the grace of God goes any one of us”. [You must be registered and logged in to see this link.]
Another article: '[You must be registered and logged in to see this link.]' he says this: "The McCanns are right to keep searching. From the start, the Portuguese cops have been more hindrance than help. British detectives say the Algarve is awash with paedophiles. Of course it is. Because there's little chance of them being nicked by local coppers who couldn't find their own bottoms with sat nav."
Maddie McCann cop adds insult to injury
By Tony Parsons
If, as has been suggested in Portugal, there was a “media circus” around the disappearance of Madeleine McCann, then it is the Portuguese police who are the clowns.
Cruel, stupid, spiteful clowns.
You would never guess it but Kate and Gerry McCann are not actually on trial in Lisbon.
Madeleine’s parents have brought legal action against detective Goncalo Amaral, who they accuse of libelling them in his book, Maddie: The Truth Of The Lie.
But the Portuguese plods have used the libel case to declare open season on the McCanns. One former policeman, Francisco Moita Flores, told the court that only the “distraction” of the “media circus” prevented the McCanns from being charged with negligence.
“No one believed it was an abduction,” he told the court. “It was a fairytale, a fable.”
But if Madeleine was not abducted, then what happened?
The Portuguese police were shown up as a bunch of clueless amateurs by the Madeleine case, and – shamed, embarrassed, infuriated – they turned their rage on the McCanns.
Even now, the Portuguese cops treat Kate and Gerry McCann with a grotesque lack of respect.
Asked if he cared that he had hurt the McCanns, Goncalo Amaral told a BBC reporter: “No, f*** the McCanns.”
A class act, that fat copper, who has sought to make money out of a stolen child – and the endless grief of her parents.
And what a shock to see the faces of Kate and Gerry McCann back in our newspapers.
The indelible pain is stamped on their faces for ever.
The greatest tragedy is, of course, that a little girl was stolen from her family.
But it is also genuinely tragic that the Portuguese police did not seriously look for the bastard who stole her.
And that’s because they have always been far too busy slandering that little girl’s parents. [You must be registered and logged in to see this link.]
It is doubtful whether Parsons will ever trouble himself to look at some of the disturbing facts about the case discussed on CMOMM and elsewhere.
That would spoil another good article, wouldn’t it, Tony?
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Re: 'ROGUE OF THE DAY'
Tony Parsons...
"When our daughter was small, my wife and I lost track of her for 30 minutes after a ballet class. It was the longest - and worst - half hour of my life. I can’t pretend to imagine what Kate and Gerry McCann have been through."
lronically Kate and Gerry must have experienced this 30 minutes of fear and panic most nights of their holiday as that was the interval between the checks.
According to them, their babies were out of sight and earshot for 30 minutes at a time. They can't say 'we knew where they were' then say one disappeared but we're not sure how or when.
Parson's like most modern day journalists do little or no research - just copy and paste from other sources or maybe in his case uses 'gut instinct'. Unfortunately his gut has a greater concentration of bile than most.
.
"When our daughter was small, my wife and I lost track of her for 30 minutes after a ballet class. It was the longest - and worst - half hour of my life. I can’t pretend to imagine what Kate and Gerry McCann have been through."
lronically Kate and Gerry must have experienced this 30 minutes of fear and panic most nights of their holiday as that was the interval between the checks.
According to them, their babies were out of sight and earshot for 30 minutes at a time. They can't say 'we knew where they were' then say one disappeared but we're not sure how or when.
Parson's like most modern day journalists do little or no research - just copy and paste from other sources or maybe in his case uses 'gut instinct'. Unfortunately his gut has a greater concentration of bile than most.
.
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Clarence Mitchell
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Clarence Mitchell
On the day Madeleine McCann was reported missing, Clarence Mitchell ruled the roost at Tony Blair’s expensive, 40-strong: ‘Media Monitoring Unit’. Forty people, costing millions a year, not to make the country run any better, but just to see what the press were saying about the government! Of course, it would be more appropriately called the ‘Media Manipulation Unit’, because - as Mitchell once famously boasted to Spanish magazine ‘L’Espresso’ -: “My job was to control what comes out in the media”.
For 10 years, Clarence Mitchell has been the ever-present PR spokesman for the McCanns. And what his main achievement has been is to produce a most unholy alliance between the need of the McCanns and the government to hide what really happened to Madeleine McCann, and the need of a failing print media for great front page stories to raise flagging newspaper sales and drum up sagging advertising revenue.
Who has benefited from this unholy alliance? The McCanns and the McCann Team. The British government. The nonentities who were employed at vast cost by Operation Grange. The Sun. The Mirror, the Mail, the Express, The News of the World –and other British papers.
Who’s lost out? We have. The public. We have been denied the truth. It has been a 10-year victory - so far - for PR over the truth.
Some idea of the intensity of Clarence Mitchell’s interaction with the press can be gleaned from the evidence of Daniel Sanderson of the News of the World to the Leveson enquiry on press standards. He gave evidence about the publication of Kate’s dairy and said:
“It was clear to me that we could not publish the story without the McCanns’ permission. My understanding of the situation was that Mr Edmondson had sought permission to publish the diary from Mr Mitchell.
“I acquired this understanding because Mr Edmondson told me that he was going to speak to Mr Mitchell about the story at the end of the week.
“It is only natural Mr Edmondson sought that permission because he had an ongoing. relationship with Mr Mitchell. As I understand it, they spoke almost daily on the phone to talk about stories connected to the case”.
But, of course, Mitchell did not only talk to the News of the World daily, he talked to all the other papers as well. His strategy appeared to be to hand out stories to the main tabloids like giving a child sweets.
The press was desperate for good front page stories. Anything to put an appealing photo of Madeleine McCann on their front cover.
‘Madeleine in U.S.’, ‘Raymond Hewlett did it’, ‘Madeleine went on yacht to Australia’, ’Maddie in Morocco’, ’Maddie in hellish Lair’, ‘Maddie home by Christmas’, ‘McCanns buoyed by new lead’ etc. etc.
Absolutely any old rubbish was printed.
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But very often Clarence Mitchell was not named in these stories. The information had come from:
‘A family pal’
‘A source close to the family’
‘A family friend’
‘A source close to the police’
‘A source close to the investigation’
‘A Scotland Yard source’.
A pound to a penny that all these were Clarence Mitchell himself.
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Last word on Clarence Mitchell to Richard D Hall and his quite brilliant 9-minute compilation of a dozen or more of Mitchell’s outright lies about the Madeleine McCann case in front of a group of semi-conscious, gullible Australian journalists, in ‘Clarence Mitchell Lies to Australian CommsCon Conference about Madeleine McCann, subtitled; ‘Clarence Mitchell’s Cesspit of Lies’, link here:
Actually, I’ve just watched that video again. It’s more than 12 lies. I counted 22.
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A wise man once said: "Be careful who you let on your ship,
because some people will sink the whole ship just because they can't be The Captain."
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Michael Shrimpton
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Former barrister Michael Shrimpton arrives at Southwark Crown Court to defend himself
Michael Shrimpton
Michael Shrimpton was an exceptionally bright, talented and successful barrister. But he began to fall from grace, becoming a Walter Mitty character who increasingly came up with fantastical stories which bore little relation to reality.
A true expert on the law of the British constitution and on weights and measures legislation, he became famous in 2001 as the defender of Steve Thoburn, the ‘metric martyr’ greengrocer who was punished for defying the European Union-enforced law which required him to sell his bananas and other produce in kilograms instead of pounds. He wrote a masterly legal Opinion on the subject and forced the government to invent an entirely new concept - a ‘hierarchy of statutes’ - to get around the fact, which Shrimpton proved beyond doubt, that the law imposing the sale of loose goods in kilos was actually illegal.
But enough of that, what was his involvement in the Madeleine McCann case?
Shrimpton had for years moved in intelligence circles. He was forever boasting about his intelligence knowledge and contacts. He had also become an attention-seeker, for example making up another fantastical story, this time about Dr David Kelly being killed by Iraqi hit-men.
And so it was that Shrimpton issued what came to be known as the ‘Shrimpton Report’, purportedly an account of what the intelligence services had told him had really happened to Madeleine McCann.
I actually have the full Shrimpton report on my forum, plus oodles of posts by Shrimpton, as he was once a member both of CMOMM and the Missing Madeleine forum . I had to remove it all form public view because, quite frankly, it was all rubbish.
Perhaps he might more generously be called a ‘Walter Mitty fantasist’ rather than a ‘rogue’. So that you can judge for yourselves. I have pulled out four paragraphs from Shrimpton’s ramblings so that you can make up your own minds.
In the last of the four, he explains what he says really happened to Madeleine McCann.
Here they are:
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“Good morning everybody, I must apologise for my delay in posting, but I attended a briefing yesterday from a US General on the US Army's impressive revision of its tactical doctrine, have had to brief in the Director's office at the FBI on the reasons why al Megrahi was correctly, in my opinion, returned to Libya, participate in a 2 1/2 hour telephone conference on security for the Olympic Games, formulating some recommendations which will go in due course to the Olympic Security Authority and deal with the wash-up from the MV Arctic Sea incident, including a courtesy call into the CNO (Chief of Naval Operations). I also went to the aid of my friend Ambassador John Bolton, who was attacked in a Telegraph forum and himself has been mis-briefed on Lockerbie, and had the plumber around to fix a leaking water tank! I shall be lucky to get 4 hours sleep tonight, and please do not be offended if I am a little slow responding to comments. I work 24/7 in the sense that I might make or take calls from time zones as far apart as Taiwan, Edwards AFB, Wellington (tonight!) and Jerusalem in a day, or get rung up by CIA at 3 am (that's happened - perils of stored numbers!)(I think I must have yawned about halfway through this telephone conference when one of the boys twigged and asked what time it was with me, leading to a cheap crack about thinking the CIA had clocks!!). Life gets hectic at times. Thank goodness for rewind on Sky, otherwise I would miss the Australian wickets@..
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“Having been courteous enough to allow me to join your forum please allow me to clear up some misunderstandings. The e-mail from myself was NOT an article, nor was it for publication, nor was it placed on the Internet with my consent, nor would consent have been given had it been sought. It was a reply to an e-mail to me, copied to a private discussion group and was not intended for publication. For the avoidance of doubt whilst I believe Madeleine was sedated on the night she was kidnapped I am NOT suggesting that she was sedated by her poor parents, for whom I have the greatest sympathy. Sedation is a standard feature of child kidnap. I have a low opinion of Metodo 3 but then they have a low opinion of me, so we're equal. Had they known CNI (Spanish internal intelligence) read my report they might have been a bit kinder, but there it is. CNI are quite charming people by the way , and provide good coffee - a lot better than the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, believe me!”
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“Now the McCann case. I was first involved within about 24 hours of the kidnap, when it started to look like a bad one., ie a paedophile ring. MI6 got an officer down there pretty quickly, no names no pack drill (some stuff I can talk about, some I can't), it was quite clear the poor girl had been taken and that her parents were NOT involved, equally clear blaming them, apart from some childcare arrangements which were not ideal (and didn't make a difference since the bad guys were tooled up, with silencers) was a convenient way out and that there were heavy duty political considerations. Six were hauled off, officially, pretty quickly and the case handed over to Leicestershire Police and the locals. Not good. Of course the intelligence passing across my desk went to the police, but it had an irritating habit of finding its way to Lisbon and we never found a way of closing down the leak, nor was there a way of keeping material off computers, which were clearly insecure (nothing the police could do about it - trapdoors are integral and if you're using a Chinese made chip you've had it, if Peking are on the other side dishing out the codes)”
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“The leaked report was prepared at the request of a former member of the Joint Intelligence Committee, as it states. It was handled very securely, initially, but the Prime Minister's first copy went walkies, via a member of the Cabinet, and was leaked, disgracefully, to the Mirror, in modified form, presumably to try and disguise the leak; the idiot who leaked it may have thought by leaving my typos in he'd make me look silly, not realising these were verification typos, an old German trick Mossad (lovely people) pointed out to me a few years back. By the time it was leaked, Madeleine had been moved, i.e. the leak did not prejudice a rescue had one been authorised (it wasn't, to my utter fury). We never again got real-time intelligence about where she was being held. Yes, Madeleine she was moved to Chile - remember the sighting report from Cordoba? That was her; ditto Vicuna, in Chile. The bad guys tripped up there - remember my Chilean client. The Chilean Air Force were wonderful - they had a 707 Phalcon, a lovely bit of kit, which I am told did a high-level fly-over to verify, but they would have needed a new coup to get permission to mount a rescue. If you want to kidnap a child, don't do it in Chile. She was moved by road back to Argentina, then to Europe, and the next we heard of her was the Montpelier sighting, the tape of which (commercial, not DST) was held back from Task, the judge and the poor family. Of course, she was alive in early 2008 - the sniffer dog evidence is worthless, as the dogs cannot identify the cadaver - they can only scent a cadaver, all you need to lay a false trail is a body, or piece of clothing from a body. I am sorry to say the idea of Madeleine's parents carting her dead body round in a rented Renault is risible. Since there is CCTV footage of her alive and well (she was not mis-treated, thank God, according to the video evidence) in 2008 and the Renault was handed back in 2007. Very obviously she was never in the Renault, alive or dead, after that fateful Thursday. I have no reason to doubt that the tragic intelligence that she was murdered, by fatal injection, by the DVD [German state intelligence agency], in December 2008 is correct”.
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A wise man once said: "Be careful who you let on your ship,
because some people will sink the whole ship just because they can't be The Captain."
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Re: 'ROGUE OF THE DAY'
Re: Michael Shrimpton
What sheer unadulterated nonsense!
I've read some pretty crazy theories about the case but this one takes the top prize - the golden raspberry award!
The world's gone completely bonkers.
What sheer unadulterated nonsense!
I've read some pretty crazy theories about the case but this one takes the top prize - the golden raspberry award!
The world's gone completely bonkers.
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“ The secret of life is honesty and fair dealing. If you can fake that, you've got it made" - Groucho Marx
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Re: 'ROGUE OF THE DAY'
Blimey, that really is quality cobblers. What hope...''Doh!''
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The lying didn't end it. The insult to my intelligence did.
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Rebekah Brooks
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Rebekah Brooks
She edited the Sun for years, then her idol Rupert Murdoch made her the Chief Executive Officer of his international media empire, News International. For years she bedded Andy Coulson, former editor of the News of the World, and David Cameron’s Director of Communications from 2009 to 2011. Cameron and Coulson appointed the McCanns’ PR chief, Clarence Mitchell, as Cameron’s Deputy Director of Communications in early 2010, during the General Election Campaign.
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Before she was forced to resign over the Millie Dowler ‘phone hacking affair, and the scandal over top Metropolitan Police officers being paid to supply information to Murdoch’s newspapers, she oversaw literally hundreds of non-stories about the disappearance of Madeleine McCann, which must have made millions of extra pounds for her boss, Murdoch.But her most powerful moment came in May 2011, at the fourth anniversary of Madeleine’s reported disappearance.
This was a very exciting moment for the McCanns - and Rebekah Brooks was right in the thick of it. One of her newspapers, the Sun, serialised Kate McCann’s ‘heartbreaking’ book, ‘madeleine’. The serialisation lasted two weeks and was a huge boost to sales of the Sun whilst at the same time promoting Kate McCann’s ‘Book of Truth’. Or as Donald Trump’s press spokesman might have said: “We have alternative facts”.
For the past two years or more, the McCanns had desperately tried to force the government to grant them an independent review.
The McCanns said they needed to see all the Portuguese police reports ‘to see if they had missed any important leads’.
Labour Home Secretary Alan Johnson had refused them. So had the new Home secretary, Theresa May.
But someone was much more powerful than either of these Home Secretaries.
A near neighbour of David Cameron, the two had been horse riding together. They would text each other, ‘Call me Dave’ Cameron signing off (as he thought), ‘Lots of Love’. Only much later did Cameron learn that every time he sent lots of love to Rebekah he was actually typing ‘Laugh out Loud’!
Rebekah Brooks found a way to get that review the Mcanns were so desperate for. She had the brass neck to threaten her friend the Prime Minister of Great Britain and Northern Ireland with ‘a week of bad headlines about Theresa May.
She was successful. Cameron buckled and asked his new Home Secretary Theresa May to order the hapless Sir Paul Stephenson, then the Met Police Commissioner, to set up Operation Grange. Nearly six years later, at a cost of over £13 million so far, it is still running. David Cameron’s spokesman at the time said the purpose of the review was ‘to help the family’ - which proved accurate, since the review’s remit was to investigate the abduction.
At the Leveson enquiry, Lord Leveson asked Ms Brooks if she had ‘threatened’ the Prime Minister.
“I wouldn’t use that word”, Brooks smirked.
“What word would you use?”, asked Leveson.
With a coquettish smile, Brooks answered: ‘Persuaded’.
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A wise man once said: "Be careful who you let on your ship,
because some people will sink the whole ship just because they can't be The Captain."
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