For Mr. Polaine, the revised ruling by the U.K. Bar Standards Board is redemption. For other key figures in Tempura, it is damnation.
However, if anyone’s forced to do penance, it will be the Cayman Islands taxpayers, who may find themselves on the hook for yet another significant financial mea culpa, this time potentially to make amends for Mr. Polaine’s time in Purgatory. The ongoing civil suit filed by former Police Commissioner Stuart Kernohan, who was fired during Tempura, could cost millions more.
To review: From mid-2008 to 2009, Mr. Polaine acted as legal adviser for the U.K. investigative team led by Martin Bridger. The Tempura team relied on Mr. Polaine’s counsel — which has since been determined to have been incorrect — to make the unlawful arrest of Cayman Islands Grand Court Justice Alexander Henderson in September 2008. The judge was eventually awarded $1.275 million in damages in a lawsuit settlement, while Mr. Polaine was forced to perform an apology before the court and was disbarred, a primary reason being that he had dispensed legal advice without having been called to the Bar in Cayman.
According to Mr. Polaine, the U.K. board has accepted his assertion that there was no requirement for him to be called to the Cayman Bar because he was working on a government contract. The board quashed its original decision of disbarment and replaced it with a two-month suspension – now based solely on the charge of “professional misconduct” in relation to applying to a Justice of the Peace for search warrants of Justice Henderson’s home and judicial chambers.
Mr. Polaine has maintained he was authorized to work in the territory by Cayman Islands Attorney General Sam Bulgin, who along with Mr. Polaine, Mr. Bridger, Governor Stuart Jack and a handful of others, formed a key cadre involved in the dubious and ill-fated investigation.
However, when things began to get rough, Mr. Polaine and Mr. Bridger were ejected from the inner circle and their former allies became adversaries.
It is now apparent from the U.K. board decision that Mr. Polaine had been made out to be a much greater villain than he ever was. Some wags may be so irreverent as to call him a scapegoat, a patsy, or a pigeon.
Whatever the nomenclature, Mr. Polaine’s cause for celebration is a cause for renewed scrutiny of Tempura and the ensuing reactions of the Cayman and U.K. governments, which have fought (with admirable British resolve) to keep much information about Tempura from ever seeing the light of day.
Nevertheless, as the sordid details of Tempura continue to drip, drip, drip into the public realm, the reason for the government’s lack of disclosure is becoming increasingly obvious: That is, the truth behind the nightmarish fiasco of Tempura will prove an indictment of the actions of powerful public officials, operating under the sanction of the U.K. government.
If, as it has been determined, Mr. Polaine’s arrangement was perfectly legal and in fact commonplace, why did Cayman leaders and U.K. representatives allow Mr. Polaine to languish in disbarment for four years?
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The problem with Tempura is that, as the years go by, it is becoming increasing difficult to work out who is covering up what and why.
Whilst this editorial points the finger at an inner circle of people in positions of power the true picture is far more complex so the actions of some of the other players also need reviewing.
As a start look at what I discovered about the 2009 audit. This was systematically compromised by what I suppose could politely be described as selective release of information. Possibly the most disturbing example of this was the fact that, as was later admitted by the Met, lucrative contracts for the employment of private investigation staff were decided in a way that completely contradicts the account given to Dan Duguay. In fact according to the Met these contracts were put in place by decisions made in London whilst Tempura was still in the covert phase and without any consultation with CIG. This resulted in some quite extraordinary payments being made to former Met officers for work that in one case was later handed back to a serving Detective Inspector who carried on the same job at just their Met salary plus reasonable expenses. Martin Polaine’s recruitment by John Yates and Martin Bridger (as recounted in a UK court on 4 October 2011) in July/August 2008 was also not reported to the audit.
Next, we have the 2010 complaint that resulted in the still-secret Aina report. This was authored by Martin Polaine but eventually pursued by Martin Bridger. At the beginning of 2011 Mr Polaine selectively leaked extracts from the document to the FT but has stubbornly refused to release any copies to the rest of the media. Last year Mr Bridger was challenged by Duncan Taylor to make the complaint public but he ducked the opportunity. Why they are so reluctant to do this (particularly when Mr Bridger launched a major attack on the former Governor and others last year by releasing it to the press) remains unclear. However, my suspicion is that the contents of the complaint might raise serious questions about where the source material for it came from.
Which conveniently brings us to the question of a large quantity of confidential documents from the original Tempura investigation that, according to FOI releases by RCIPS and the Met, disappeared while being transferred to the UK. The ownership of these is currently being argued through the courts after some of them turned up in the possession of the former SIO for use as additional defence evidence in his on-going civil case with Stuart Kernohan. The court ruling from the last hearing in November 2013 is on record so you can read Justice Williams’ comments about custody of this material for yourselves but the fact remains that the true reason for these records being removed from the Cayman Islands is still unclear. In fact the ruling raises a lot more questions than it answers.
Finally, there is the rather belated complaint made last year by Mr Bridger against the former Governor and others. This was submitted to the Directorate of Professional Standards (DPS) at the Met, despite the fact they have no authority to investigate matters outside their own force let alone outside the UK, who passed it on to Duncan Taylor who in turn handed it over to RCIPS. Despite several requests I understand Mr Bridger has failed to follow this up with a formal complaint to RCIPS so it cannot be properly investigated locally.
Quite how the DPS investigation was pushed through in a matter of weeks at a time when most complainants with genuine grievances relating to policing issues in the London area itself can expect to wait anything up to a year for a response and why DPS even diverted resources to it in the first place remains a mystery. However, this was not the first time Mr Bridger had been assisted by DPS in disputes relating to Tempura since he left the Met. At the end of 2011 the then head of DPS successfully applied on his behalf for legal funding to contest the initial UK court hearing over ownership of the disputed documents – that decision in turn forced CIG to add yet more money to the already substantial legal bill for Tempura.
The sum total of all this is that, although we are now getting into nearly five years of this fiasco, no one is admitting anything about what really went on (or is still going on) and it all continues to look just like one big cover up.
In the past I have called for a public inquiry into Tempura. I now accept that this is impractical due to the passage of time, the fact that so many of the relevant records are either missing or compromised and evidence of some very determined attempts by a number of people to muddy the waters.
However, I still think this whole matter needs to be properly wrapped up and the public told exactly how, since September 2007, something like CI$25 million has been wasted on it without any tangible results.
During 2013 the Auditor General engaged in what can best be described as a very robust effort not to re-open the Tempura/Cealt audit. This is despite new evidence showing that the original audit was compromised, possibly illegally, and other revelations that raise serious questions about the conclusions made in 2009. Maybe someone in authority should start asking him why this is?