KEVIN HALLIGEN: British taxpayer will pay tens of thousands to try to keep 'Madeleine con-man' Kevin Halligen in Britain

Almost exactly a year after Mark Hollingsworth sensationally, in the Evening Standard, revealed that con-man Kevin Halligen had wasted half a million pounds on highly questionable activities in the Madeleine McCann investigation, Hollingsworth pops up again to inform us that the British taxpayer will now have to pay hefty barristers' fees on Legal Aid to try to get him out of having to face trial in the U.S. on an alleged $2 million (£1.3 million) fraud.

A reminder of our article: 'The McCanns' private investigators - investigated' by John Whitehouse on our website: [You must be registered and logged in to see this link.] - click on 'Articles'

Historical note: Kevin Halligen was personally chosen to head the McCanns' private investigation by Brian Kennedy.

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Maddie McCann investigator to get legal aid in battle against U.S. fraud chargesBy Christopher Leake and Mark Hollingsworth
Last updated at 4:16 AM on 29th August 2010

[Photo: Extradition: Identity card of private detective Kevin Halligen]

A private detective whose firm was paid up to £500,000 from publicly donated funds to find Madeleine McCann is to get tens of thousands of pounds in legal aid to fight extradition to the US for fraud charges.

Kevin Halligen, 50, told Kate and Gerry McCann he could find their daughter but allegedly spent the cash on a lifestyle of first-class flights, chauffeured cars, nightclubs and luxury hotels and goods.

In a separate alleged scam he was arrested last November at the £700-a-night Old Bank Hotel in Oxford.
US authorities issued an extradition warrant accusing Halligen of defrauding a law firm of £1.3 million by ­claiming he could help free two men jailed in war-torn Africa. It is claimed he instead spent the money on a mansion.

A document filed in the District Court of Columbia claims he took money, saying his firm could help secure the release of two executives from the multi­national company Trafigura jailed in Ivory Coast in 2007 for allegedly dumping toxic waste.

He is said to have suggested a rescue operation to fly in South African mercenaries, but it was cancelled. The duo were freed a few months later after a reported £120 million payment.

Halligen, who claimed to have worked for MI5 and the CIA, linked up with the McCanns a year after the 2007 disappearance of three-year-old Madeleine on a family holiday at Praia da Luz, Portugal.

He boasted of ‘contacts’ in Washington who could provide satellite imagery to help the search. Oakley International, a company run by Halligen, was hired by the fund set up by Madeleine’s parents, but was dropped after six months due to claims of too little progress and too much spending.

[Picture: Fees: Halligen, who claimed to have worked for MI5 and the CIA, linked up with the McCanns a year after the 2007 disappearance of their daughter]

Now British taxpayers are to pay for top-flight lawyers to fight Dublin-born Halligen’s extradition. His team includes a leading extradition barrister whose fees are thought to be at least £2,000 a day.

Additional fees for renowned London fraud solicitors Janes will boost costs even further.

The award of legal aid to ­Halligen, remanded at a London jail since arrest, was confirmed by Westminster magistrates this month. His next extradition hearing is on Wednesday.

Last night a spokesman for Kate and Gerry McCann would not comment on the case.

A spokeswoman for the Legal Services Commission said last night: ‘The decision on whether legal aid is required is made by the court.’

A Ministry of Justice spokeswoman said: ‘We’ve announced the start of a fundamental look at the legal aid system.’

ENDS

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AND there's this story...

Madeleine McCann investigator didn't listen to ANY tip-offs given to hotline - and squandered £500,000
By Daniel Boffey In Washington
Last updated at 1:52 AM on 29th August 2010

A private eye whose company was paid £500,000 from a public fund to find Madeleine McCann squandered the money on a series of bizarre schemes that had no chance of locating the missing child.

Kevin Halligen, who claimed to have experience in the British secret services, was arrested last week in an Oxford hotel after an FBI manhunt over an unrelated £1.3million fraud case in America.

His investigations company, Oakley International, was taken on in March last year by the Find Madeleine Fund and her parents Kate and Gerry McCann.

Mystery man: Kevin Halligen, the private eye whose company was employed by the McCanns, pictured with girlfriend Shirin Trachiotis in Washington, where in one month he spent more than £3,000 on dining out

But The Mail on Sunday can reveal today that despite setting up a hotline for potential informants and witnesses, none of the hundreds of calls received by a call centre hired by Halligen, 48, was listened to by Oakley investigators - and Halligen also bragged to his colleagues that he had executed a series of peculiar tactics to find Madeleine.

He claimed to have hired an actor to pretend to be a 'drunken priest' who would seek confessions as he toured the bars of Praia da Luz, the resort where Madeleine disappeared in May 2007.

And he told colleagues that a family with a Madeleine lookalike daughter had been paid to set up home in a nearby resort in order to tempt out a potential kidnapper.

Meanwhile, a paper trail obtained by The Mail on Sunday shows that Halligen, a former director of a catering firm, launched an extraordinary spending spree on hotels, cigar bars, restaurants and luxury goods while he was in the pay of the Find Madeleine Fund, and in the period shortly after he was fired last summer.

[Picture: Missing: Madeleine McCann disappeared in May 2007]

Documents show that in his first two months as lead investigator in the search for Madeleine, Halligen spent £7,000 on a personal chauffeur.

A few months later, on a short trip to New York with a girlfriend, he lavished £1,600 on Salvatore Ferragamo leather goods, £5,500 on handbags, £500 on an Italian meal, £150 on a pair of designer glasses and £900 on a three-night stay at the five-star Renaissance Hotel.

And in a one-month visit to Washington, where he owned a £1.5million mansion, he spent more than £3,000 on dining out and £6,000 on a room at the US capital's Intercontinental Hotel.

He also paid out more than £50,000 on plumbing and mosaic tiling for his house in Great Falls, Virginia - a property in which he has never spent a night because of constant home-improvement work.

The revelations will dismay everyone who donated to the Find Madeleine Fund. But perhaps of most concern is the lack of attention paid to the hundreds of phone calls received by the Madeleine hotline.

Halligen and Oakley International, based in Washington, failed to listen to a single call received on the hotline set up for potential informants by Kate and Gerry McCann last year.

Johan Selle, the director of operations at iJet, the US firm that managed the Find Madeleine phone line, revealed that for a year nobody even asked his company if they could listen to any of the calls received.

Mr Selle said his operators, in Annapolis, Virginia, had answered 'hundreds of calls', but the information seemed wasted - possibly squandering valuable leads.

He said: 'We delivered Oakley a report with a summary of the calls and said if they wanted to come back they could listen to the recording, but nobody did.

'For someone with an understanding of the case it would be very easy for some to say that maybe 80 or 90 per cent of the calls were hogwash, but there may be a percentage where one would say maybe we should listen to this one or listen to that one. But our understanding is that this never took place.

'We are not sure whether Halligen provided our report to the family or to the trust or to those working with them or to the teams working after him, because no one came back to us.

'We sent the report to Oakley group and our assumption was that they were using it as a piece in the puzzle. But it appears that wasn't the case.'

The firm says it was not paid for it services by Halligen or Oakley International.

[Picture: Arrested: Kevin Halligen being led away by a policeman in Oxford]

Two of Halligen's former colleagues in the investigation, John Taylor and Dr Richard Parton, said they became concerned early on in their working relationship with the self- styled 'super-spy'.

Dr Parton, whose company Psyintel was employed for its expertise on interview techniques, said he and his partner had been encouraged by Halligen to get involved with the high-profile case.

Halligen had also mentioned other future projects that could net them millions of pounds, although these schemes never came to fruition.

But Dr Parton said fears over Halligen's suitability for the job first arose when the private detective suddenly asked him to stop calling him Richard, the name by which they had known him for several years. He then also raised details of Halligen's extraordinary tactics to find Madeleine.

Dr Parton, who claims he was later left with an unpaid invoice for £50,000, said: 'It was very strange. I had met him years earlier and it had been Richard. Then before a meeting with some people who wanted a presentation on my techniques, I was asked to call him Kevin from then on. I thought it was odd but he was so secretive and that was just the way he was.

'Whenever we had a meeting he would also always immediately say that he needed to leave for a flight. Every time. He would always also try to get the conversation around to talking about the psychological characteristics of a sociopath.'

Dr Parton added: 'I repeatedly told him his investigators on the ground in Portugal were not doing a proper job but he insisted lots of things were going on I didn't know about.

'That is when he told me about some of his schemes, such as the drunken priest seeking confessions from people drinking in the bars of Praia da Luz and the family with a girl who looked similar to Madeleine. This family were set up, apparently, in a resort near to Praia da Luz just to sit and wait and see what happened.
'It was all such a waste of money and time.'

However, it was only later, when tape recordings of interviews undertaken in Praia da Luz were sent to Dr Parton and Mr Taylor, in Washington, that they started to fear the worst for the investigation.

Mr Taylor said: 'The quality of the interviews was terrible, very amateurish. The noise in the background was bad, the interview questions were useless and the subjects were irrelevant. I told them to stop wasting time and money on such low-key figures - homeless people and receptionists who knew nothing.'

[Picture: Kevin Halligen's US identity card]

Things came to a head after Halligen reneged on repeated promises to pay their invoice. Dr Parton said: 'I took him to one side and asked when I was due to be paid. Three days later he disappeared. He had fled to Rome with his girlfriend.'

It was then that Dr Parton and Mr Taylor started to contact others who had been hired by Oakley International. Mr Taylor added: 'He would hire lots of people to do work but only pay a few of them. Meanwhile, he was spending lots of money on his own lifestyle. It only gave the appearance that work was being done.'

They also contacted Maria Dybczak, a trade lawyer for the US Commerce Department, whom they understood to be Halligen's wife. It emerged she had agreed to go along with a fake wedding service to keep up appearances for Halligen.

Dr Parton said: 'She admitted she wasn't proud of it but she had been tricked, too. He claimed that a job he was doing with the CIA meant that he couldn't have his name on a marriage certificate.

'She was manipulated into going along with a fake wedding with an actor posing as a priest. He said they would get properly married a few weeks later, but that never happened.'

Shortly afterwards Halligen fled to Rome with a girlfriend, named in a writ filed by another former colleague as Shirin Trachiotis, a glamorous doctor based in Washington.

Almost immediately after arriving in Rome on their first-class Lufthansa tickets, Halligen withdrew hundreds of thousands of pounds more from Oakley International's bank accounts and spent £8,000 on a luxury hotel before slinking back to the UK a few months later.

Dr Parton said: 'He has left a trail of debts across America and the UK. But the horrible truth is that he stole from the McCanns what they really couldn't afford - time.'

Following a short hearing at Westminster Magistrates' Court last week, Halligen was refused bail and was remanded in custody until December 2, when the next stage of his case for extradition will be heard.

The US Department of Justice issued an indictment for Halligen, from Surrey, earlier this month alleging that he tried to defraud a London law firm.

They claim he took £1.3million as part of a deal to secure the release of Dutch business executives arrested in the Ivory Coast. Instead, it is claimed, he spent it on a mansion, a gift to his girlfriend, cash machine withdrawals and debit-card transactions.

Kate and Gerry McCanns' spokesman Clarence Mitchell refused to be drawn on the details of Oakley's investigation, much of which, it is understood, the McCanns were unaware of. He said: 'The first phase of the contract was satisfactorily seen through, such as the setting up of the hotline. Towards the end of it there were question marks about delivery and the relationship was terminated.

'Given Mr Halligen is in custody it is inappropriate to comment further.'

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END

Whilst we have Halligen in custody, it would be expedient to have him interviewed. Preferably not by the 'two top detectives' whom are in Kennedy's employ.

Just the fact that he squandered the fee paid to him but didnt do the job, and the mccanns didnt use this opportunity while he is under remand to take him to task renders it highly suspicious of the real purpose he was hired for.

If they were to claim they didnt know he was a con-man, well they do now; surely more so shouldnt they be doing something about it or sue him to recover back the money?
Is it because the money didnt come from their own pockets so they didnt feel the pinch or hurt ? Or, is it because they're afraid suing him would open up a can of worms?
Or is it down to purely the cold truth - because they knew all along he's a con man. It was a hire as smokescreen only to maintain their abduction theory and they didnt expect or in fact knew very well he wasnt going investigate at all, hence no risk of him showing up their faked abduction story?

If Halligen was paid by the fund donated by public, did the Board of directors authorise BK or given him the power of attorney to decide what he can do with fund that didnt belong to him? Most importantly who authorised him to hire these dodgy PIs? Who are the board of directors of the Fund, and did the Board ratify BK as hirer or approved of his hire?

If BK isnt one of the directors, questions should be asked why of all people he was given the role and who ratified his role.

Questions also should be asked about the process of hire? Did the Board of directors go through a selection process, where a few names were sourced or recommended; what were the critierias to qualify them? How were they selected, and were all these done at Board of Directors meetings and the ultimate choice approved collectively by the Board.

Why are the Board of Directors not pursuing and questioning the dodgy hires, and why didnt they instruct for the pursuing of Halligen to recover back money for job not done at all?

The legality of the fund is a highly contentious issue and the reckless ways they spent the fund without regards to doners goodfaith makes the legality of it more glaring and questionable.

For those of us who realise Madeleine McCann died in the apartment the whole fund is a fraud.

But if you set that aside and then look at how the money that the public donated* has been spent.....

Metado, Halligen , the clapped out coppers.... you have to ask what was the purpose of spending this money? Was it to find Madeleine? Were Brian Kennedy and Gerry duped or were these organisations employed for other purposes?

If Brian Kennedy knowingly engaged the services of these dubious organisations and individuals for any purpose other than to find Madeleine then that is fraud.

I do not know who should investigate but I do know that public sector organisations must follow very strict guidelines regarding the application of public funds (Financial Propriety).

It is thus completely wrong for Leicester Police to link their website to the McCanns fund raising website when so many questions need to be answered about the true purpose of those funds. Leicester Police are effectively encouraging members of the public to commit their hard earned cash to an organisation that is spending large sums of this cash on charlatans and con-men !!!

If I were the Finance Director of Leicester Constabulary I would be feeling very uncomfortable about this situation.


* myself included, chucked some coins into a collecting box at a Tesco checkout!

Mr.D: "It is thus completely wrong for Leicester Police to link their website to the McCanns fund raising website when so many questions need to be answered about the true purpose of those funds. Leicester Police are effectively encouraging members of the public to commit their hard earned cash to an organisation that is spending large sums of this cash on charlatans and con-men!!!"

110% correct,and I've enlarged it for effect - and a major reason why we must build pressure on this government for a FULL and PUBLIC enquiry into ALL matters relating to Madeleine's disappearance, with the power to summon witnesses, including those from Portugal

Kevin Halligen remanded in custody, 01 September 2010
Kevin Halligen remanded in custody

By Nigel Moore
01 September 2010, 11:30am

Statement concerning Kevin Halligen's hearing this morning:

'The case has been adjourned to 20th September 2010, 10.30am, for the full Extradition hearing, Mr. Halligen remains in custody.'

Source: City of Westminster Magistrates' Court

With thanks to the mccannfiles

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candyfloss wrote: Kevin Halligen remanded in custody, 01 September 2010
Kevin Halligen remanded in custody

By Nigel Moore
01 September 2010, 11:30am

Statement concerning Kevin Halligen's hearing this morning:

'The case has been adjourned to 20th September 2010, 10.30am, for the full Extradition hearing, Mr. Halligen remains in custody.'

Source: City of Westminster Magistrates' Court

With thanks to the mccannfiles

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He's supposed to have appeared in court today at 10.30. Just had a search and nothing. Checked mccannfiles nothing there either. Nigel had the update last time only a couple of hours after he appeared. Wondering whats happening???

Nigel has just tweeted:

Kevin Halligen's full Extradition hearing went ahead today. However, there is a further hearing on 3/11/10 at 10 am to finish it. 12 minutes ago via web

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Thanks baconbutty for the info It seems to be going on forever.

Kevin Halligen's full Extradition hearing went ahead today. However, there is a further hearing on 3/11/10 at 10 am to finish it.

Latest tweet from Nige

Doh, double post, sorry Bacon

The con-man Halligen faces charges not from the mccanns, so I doubt he would be required to answer questions pertaining to his shoddy non-delivery work where the mccanns case is concerned.

In fact if one were to look at the real purpose he was hired by BK, he's most certainly hired in spite of the knowledge he's not going to deliver on the job, that's why they're not pursuing him for the money he squandered.

No matter how one looks at it, it does not bode well for mccanns. If they claimed they didnt know his criminal past or criminal intent, now's the time to sue him to recover the money he conned them out of. Not suing him is not going to look good for them, it would mean they didnt mind him conning them ........and why would that be so? The answer is so obvious.

And indeed it is obvious to everybody else, except those who have a need to continue in perpetuating the myth of abduction.

Given that Halligen was such a leading light in his field of expertise and plucked by Kennedy to be of service the McCanns, it would be interesting to hear his comments on the Gaspars' statements. Halligen may be feeling as if he should sue both Kennedy and the McCanns for sending him on a wild goose chase. Perhaps the idea of sueing should be put to Metodo 3, and directly to Edgar next time somebody sees him searching for rainbows.

Talking of which, has our very own Rainbow evaporated? One would have thought she had much to fence with today. If she stays away too long, one fears that Priest will be soon sitting in her warm spot.