Death of the ‘Zionic woman’

Marcia Williams (later Lady Falkender) was once the most powerful woman in Britain. As political secretary to Harold Wilson – Prime Minister from 1964-70 and 1974-76 – she exercised influence in Downing Street to an extent few other such staff members have ever approached.

The precise nature of her relationship with Wilson remained a mystery, and as late as 2007 she sued the BBC for claims in a drama-documentary that she and the PM had been lovers.

Most notoriously she was held responsible for the inclusion of several disreputable businessmen in Wilson’s final honours list at the time of his resignation in 1976. This became known as the “lavender list” because it was drawn up on Falkender’s personal notepaper.

Almost all of the disreputable names on this list were wealthy Jews, but Falkender’s obituaries this weekend delicately avoided the subject of Jews and Israel – even though during the 1970s this connection was so notorious that satirical magazine Private Eye labelled Falkender “the Zionic woman”.

Heritage and Destiny readers will learn much more later this year about the web of Zionist connections in Harold Wilson’s Downing Street – a web of organised crime, money laundering and (eventually) murder.

Top Tory donor and IRA Godfather’s ‘friend’ in London vice scandal

Today’s Sunday Times front page exposes a property tycoon with a personal fortune of more than £400m; a man who boasts of his friendships with the Royal Family as well as late IRA godfather Martin McGuinness; a man who has given almost £300,000 to Prime Minister Theresa May’s Conservative Party; yet a man whose flagship London property is packed with prostitutes and has been described as “Sodom and Gomorrah” and the “infamous 10 floors of whores”.

Christopher Moran likes to describe himself as “Dr Christopher Moran” on the basis of an honorary degree from the University of Ulster, though his formal education ended when he left Owen’s Grammar School in Islington with a few ‘O’ levels in 1964.

He is a 70 year old businessman whose family home is Crosby Hall, an historic mansion on Cheyne Walk, Chelsea, that was once the City home of Tudor courtier Sir Thomas More, executed by Henry VIII in 1535, but was moved stone by stone to its present riverside location in 1910. Mr Moran is not short of hubris. As part of his controversial £50m restoration of Crosby Hall he had his own initials ‘CJM’ carved in stone together with his pretentious Latin motto Meritum, Pertinacia, Fortitudo et Fideli (Merit, Determination, Courage & Loyalty).

Moran also has a 48,000 acre estate in the Scottish Highlands.

Just a mile from Moran’s mansion is Chelsea Cloisters, a block of 670 apartments on Sloane Avenue owned by Moran’s company Realreed. In addition to the freehold on the entire block, Moran owns the lease on more than 200 of the apartments. Sunday Times journalists investigating Moran made 40 bookings in recent weeks with prostitutes using 23 apartments in Chelsea Cloisters, 15 of which are rented directly from Moran’s company.

Realreed Limited is entirely controlled by the Moran family: H&D has established that its three directors are Christopher Moran and his twin sons, 30-year-old Jamie and Charles. The twins’ mother (former Miss Thames Television, Helen Taylor) is not involved – she ran off to the South of France with local flower seller Andrew Maple in 1998 and has since been quoted as describing her former husband thus: “He doesn’t say things in jest – ever. When he wants something he will stop at nothing to get it. He wants people to remember what he has achieved and he’s very persuasive – quite ruthless, really.”

One ‘escort agency’ claims to have 100 prostitutes working at Chelsea Cloisters on any single night. Many seem to have been trafficked to London from Romania, and the Sunday Times has handed a dossier of evidence to the head of Scotland Yard’s anti-trafficking unit. Former anti-slavery commissioner Kevin Hyland confirmed to the newspaper that there had been “previous cases of [suspected] trafficking linked to Chelsea Cloisters”. One such scandal was publicised in 2004 by the London Evening Standard.

Gavin Shuker MP, chairman of a recent parliamentary investigation into the sex trade, said that the Sunday Times findings suggested Chelsea Cloisters could be Britain’s “biggest brothel”. Mr Shuker demanded that the Conservative Party, which has benefited from almost £300,000 in donations from Christopher Moran and his company, should hand the money to “charities that assist victims of human trafficking”.

Last year in an article on his own website Christopher Moran referred to his personal “friend and champion of peace, Martin McGuinness”. Via the charity Moran chairs (Co-operation Ireland) he brokered several meetings between infamous IRA godfather McGuinness and the British establishment. According to the Irish broadcaster RTE, Moran “stage managed” the historic handshake between McGuinness and the Queen in 2012, and in November 2016 hosted an event at Crosby Hall again attended by the Queen and (in one of his final public appearances) McGuinness.

RTE also reported Moran’s claim that former Prime Minister Tony Blair has used Crosby Hall as part of his shadowy business career since leaving Downing St, though the tycoon has always had closer relations with the Tories, including masterminding the £30m sale of Conservative Central Office in Smith Square. According to a report in 2006 by the Independent on Sunday, Moran was one of a group of tycoons who secretly lent a total of £5m to the cash-strapped Tories, who had to pay back the money in 2006 to avoid being forced by the Electoral Commission to publish details.

Moran’s many other high-level establishment connections include his position as Vice-President (and former Vice-Chairman) of the Council of Christians and Jews.

H&D is aware of numerous previous controversies that marred but failed to halt Christopher Moran’s meteoric rise to business prominence. He began building his empire in the late 1960s, starting as a clerk, then founding insurance brokers Christopher Moran & Co., obtaining approval to conduct business at Lloyd’s of London in the summer of 1972 when Moran was just 24.

A year later Moran paid more than £1m to acquire a Lloyd’s underwriting agency, and in 1976 he obtained a Stock Exchange listing through an £8m ‘reverse takeover’ of existing company Richardson Smith.

In the late 1970s Moran’s company was one of several big names investigated by City of London Police for alleged breaches of exchange control regulations. These ended without charges, but Moran lost a libel suit against the Daily Telegraph in the summer of 1980.

A few weeks after his failed libel action, Moran’s rapid ascent was stymied on August 1st 1980 when he was arrested and charged with conspiracy to defraud. At a bizarre meeting on October 31st 1980 in a Savoy Hotel function room, the entire board of Moran’s company quit after failing to force his resignation – but in December after a month-long trial an Old Bailey judge instructed a jury to find Moran not guilty.

Nevertheless in September 1982 the Committee of Lloyd’s found him guilty of “acts and defaults discreditable to him in connection with the business of insurance” and he became the first man in the 300-year history of Lloyd’s to be expelled from membership. According to independent arbitrator Andrew Leggatt appointed to assess the case, Moran was a man who “worshipped Mammon”.

Moran never succeeded in winning readmission to Lloyd’s after this life ban, but his fortune continued to expand despite further legal troubles, this time across the Atlantic, in 1992 when he was fined more than £1m by a US Federal court over an insider dealing case brought by the Securities and Exchange Commission.

Will Moran’s teflon coating survive the latest charges by the Sunday Times? The newspaper has been careful to assert that there is “no suggestion that Moran has any involvement with the prostitution” apparently rampant throughout his Chelsea property, and similarly H&D is not aware of any such involvement, but there are bound to be questions not only as to whether the Conservative Party should hold on to his donations, but about (for example) the position of Sir Malcolm McKibbin, recently retired head of the Northern Ireland Civil Service, as a board member of Moran’s charity Co-operation Ireland – and for that matter the charity’s joint patrons, HM The Queen and Irish President Michael Higgins.

Loyal friends of Ulster will no doubt be grateful for the courage of Sunday Times reporters who pursued this investigation, and will surely give their full support by all means necessary if those reporters continue to suffer threats, as reported in today’s newspaper.

 

Left-wing trust accused of funding terror-linked ‘charity’

The Joseph Rowntree Charitable Trust, funded by the famous Quaker chocolate family, is being investigated for donations to a charity in Northern Ireland which has been linked to dissident republican terrorism.

JRCT has given substantial grants over the years to the ‘anti-fascist’ organisations Searchlight and Hope not Hate. The latest controversy involves two sets of donations in Northern Ireland. Since 2014 the Trust has made regular grants to Teach na Failte, founded by the Irish Republican Socialist Party, political wing of the brutal terror gang Irish National Liberation Army (INLA). Teach na Failte even shares an office with the IRSP in Falls Road, Belfast. IRSP has close connections to the violent anti-fascist group ‘Red Action’, scrutinised last weekend by the Sunday Times.

In 2014 the Rowntree Trust gave Teach na Failte £149,915 followed by a further grant of £125,000 in 2017.

Other controversial donations by the Rowntree Trust involve a housing charity Conflict Resolution Services Ireland, whose Belfast offices have twice been raided by police investigating ties to the dissident republican terrorist group Oglaigh na hEireann, a splinter group from the Real IRA which was itself a breakaway from the IRA.

The chairman of trustees at CRSI, Gerry Ruddy, is on record describing the INLA’s murder of Conservative MP Airey Neave in 1979 as “a legitimate exercise”.

Earlier investigations of CRSI have suggested that (unlike Teach na Failte) it is not a straightforward front for hardline republicans linked to terrorism. CRSI’s situation is more complicated. There are allegations that it has worked to move people up the queue for local authority housing in Ulster in a racket helping to manufacture supposed ‘threats’ from paramilitaries (both republican and loyalist), and that not only the various IRA splinter groups but also drug dealers shamefully using the banner of the Loyalist Volunteer Force (LVF) have been involved in this corrupt abuse of publicly funded housing.

According to the Belfast Telegraph, official investigations involve not only CRSI but a government-funded service called ‘Base 2’ which ostensibly helps families to be rehoused if they have been threatened. Working at the CRSI’s Belfast office is Sean O’Reilly, once given a 30-month jail sentence for his role in a botched ‘punishment shooting’ on behalf of a republican terror gang.

 

Black “rising star” of Tory Party admits criminal hacking of opponent’s website

Kemi Badenoch MP, a vice-chairman of the Conservative Party responsible for Tory candidates nationwide, has admitted having hacked into the website of Labour rival Harriet Harman (at that time a cabinet minister and Deputy Leader of the Labour Party).

Mrs Badenoch’s actions are a serious criminal offence under the Computer Misuse Act 1990, punishable by up to two years’ imprisonment and/or a fine.

What makes it all the more serious is that Mrs Badenoch (who is of Nigerian origin, thus confirming that not all national stereotypes are wrong!) was not engaged in casual nonsense on Facebook, which has ended so many political careers.  Her deliberate criminality involved misusing her professional skills for the purpose of political chicanery.

Mrs Badenoch has a degree in Computer Systems Engineering from Sussex University, and worked in several high-level computer-related jobs before entering politics – including as an associate director of the exclusive private bank Coutts. Her husband Hamish Badenoch works for Deutsche Bank and is stepping down this month as a Conservative councillor in the London Borough of Merton.

Political careers have ended for far less serious offences than this; in fact many people are in jail for far less serious offences. Mrs Badenoch is presently Tory MP for Saffron Walden: her predecessors included Tory gentlemen of unimpeachable integrity – former Deputy Speaker Sir Alan Haselhurst and R.A. Butler, a former Deputy Prime Minister, Chancellor of the Exchequer, Home Secretary and Foreign Secretary.

The voters of Saffron Walden deserve better than Mrs Badenoch.

‘Anti-racist’ councillor in fraud probe

It’s been a tough summer for Britain’s anti-racists.  First Searchlight had its website sabotaged; then its editor’s former partner in crime Manny Carpel was jailed for drug trafficking; then Hope not Hate‘s funding from George Soros foundations was exposed in a massive data leak.

Now another disaster for ‘anti-fascism’.  Transport union official Sam Tarry was campaign organiser for Hope not Hate in Barking & Dagenham, once the BNP’s flagship borough, where Tarry no doubt believes he played an important role in turning back the fascist tide.

In fact that had already been achieved by the BNP leader himself, scuttling his own party, but at least Sam Tarry managed to get a seat for himself as a Labour councillor in Barking, where he has received £20,000 in council allowances.

Sadly this meteoric political rise might be about to end in yet another crash and burn.  The main headline in today’s Sunday Times exposes an “electoral fraud row” involving Cllr Tarry.

In order to stand for Barking & Dagenham council, he had to be registered as living at an address in the borough (or work there).  Yet according to the Sunday Times he actually lives 70 miles away in Brighton.

Tarry is presently director of Jeremy Corbyn’s leadership campaign.

As the Sunday Times points out:

Councillors are required by law to live or work in the borough they represent and must sign an official declaration to that effect.  Making a false declaration is punishable by up to six months in prison.  Making a false registration to vote carries a penalty of up to 51 weeks in jail.

Richard Smalley, formerly a Tory member of Derby city council, was last week sentenced to two months in jail for claiming he lived in Derby while living outside the city.

Note: The original story is behind a Times paywall so the full report can only be seen by subscribers.  However a later version of the story can also be seen on the Telegraph website.

Tarry has denied the allegations, and his lawyers suggest that “any suggestion of criminality or breach of election law is defamatory and inaccurate”.

New scandal hits extradition row Baroness

Today’s Mail on Sunday reveals a complex scandal concerning Baroness Scotland – now Secretary General of the Commonwealth – and her cosy relationship with a wealthy public relations fixer who faces being stripped of his knighthood.

H&D readers will remember Baroness Scotland as the Attorney General in Gordon Brown’s government from 2007 to 2010, who disgraced her office by colluding with the German government in its efforts to extradite Australian academic Dr Fredrick Töben.

These efforts were ultimately blocked by a British court in October 2008, allowing Dr Töben to return to Australia, but only after British nationalists and other supporters of academic freedom had to raise an astonishing £100,000 as cash security for Dr Töben’s bail pending his appeal. See report on the case here, and the eventual victory here.

The German government’s attempt to prosecute Dr Töben were only possible because Britain had signed up to the European Arrest Warrant system, which allowed government’s to apply for extradition from fellow European countries without having to go through the old procedures of a full extradition hearing into the facts of the case.

Most importantly the new system scrapped the principle of “dual criminality”, which ensured that one could only be extradited from the UK if accused of something that would have been a crime if committed here.

Dr Töben’s “crime” would certainly not have been illegal here: he was wanted in Germany under that country’s notoriously oppressive laws restricting what historians, scientists or indeed anyone else can say about certain historical topics.

Specifically Dr Töben had disputed the orthodox historical account of the supposed homicidal gas chambers which are alleged to have killed several million Jews during the Second World War, supposedly on the orders of Adolf Hitler. No one has been able to find any document from Adolf Hitler ordering such a mass murder, nor has anyone answered the famous challenge of Prof. Robert Faurisson (a French expert on documentary analysis) who asked: “show me or draw me a Nazi gas chamber”.

Nevertheless Dr Töben would assuredly have faced several years in a German prison cell had he been extradited under a European Arrest Warrant – for something that is not a crime in our country!

Earlier in her career the same Baroness Scotland – who as Attorney General was responsible for colluding with her German counterparts in the attempted judicial kidnapping of Dr Töben – had been the Home Office minister responsible for piloting the new EAW system through the House of Lords.

She specifically assured Parliament in 2003 that revisionist historians such as Dr. Töben would not be subject to extradition under European Arrest Warrants for publishing their views on the internet. Yet five years later she allowed her senior officials to proceed with exactly the type of extradition which she had promised Parliament could never take place.

Had there been any sense of honour in politics, Baroness Scotland would have resigned as Attorney General following the Töben case in 2008, yet she remained until Labour lost office in 2010 and has since been promoted (under a Tory government!) to the position of Commonwealth Secretary-General. God knows what our Commonwealth partners in Australia, New Zealand and Canada are supposed to make of this latest demeaning of high office.

In 2009 she survived public outrage and remained Attorney General even after having been found to employ an illegal immigrant as her housekeeper. Baroness Scotland was fined £5,000 for this offence but kept her job: though to his credit her parliamentary private secretary (Labour MP Stephen Hesford) resigned in protest, saying she should have quit or been sacked.

The latest scandal exposed today by The Mail on Sunday might just halt the Baroness’s meteoric rise, but as all nationalists know – “Treason doth never prosper: what’s the reason?  Why, if it prosper, none dare call it treason.”

We are not surprised to see that the Baroness’s disgraced associate “Sir” Anthony Bailey is one of the leading campaigners for British membership of the European Union, and was a big donor to David Miliband’s failed campaign for Labour leader.

Panama link of Tory tycoon: what the Sunday Times won’t tell you

Today’s Sunday Times notes that Poju Zabludowicz – a major donor to David Cameron’s Conservative Party – was involved in an offshore scheme managed by a firm involved in the ‘Panama Papers’ scandal.

Zabludowicz’s co-investor in this scheme – controversial businessman Scot Young – was found impaled on the railings outside his London flat in 2014. An inquest on Young’s death found insufficient evidence of suicide, and his family suspected he had been murdered. Young’s ex-wife believed that he had used supposed losses on his business project with Zabludowicz to hide tens of millions of pounds during their divorce: a judge agreed and awarded Young’s ex-wife £20m in 2013, but she had yet to receive a penny by the time Young died a year later.

In 2005 Zabludowicz’s trust gave £15,000 to David Cameron’s successful campaign for the Tory leadership, and has since given a series of donations to the Conservative Party totalling almost £300,000.

So far, so bad.

But what the Sunday Times for some reason omits from the story is, in many ways, the most interesting part. Poju Zabludowicz is not just any billionaire: he is arguably the most important individual in Israel’s UK lobbying effort.

Zabludowicz – whose family fortune was built up by his arms dealer father Shlomo, founder of Israel’s main artillery manufacturer – set up BICOM (the Britain Israel Communications and Research Centre) in 2002. BICOM’s best known project in recent years is ‘We Believe in Israel’, which works to combat campaigns for boycotts of Israeli products. The quarterly BICOM magazine Fathom is perhaps the leading journal of the pro-Israel lobby. Its deputy editor is former Israeli embassy official and ‘security’ expert Calev Ben-Dor, who though based in Israel was recently advertising among British parliamentary staff for a BICOM ‘research analyst’.

BICOM’s ‘senior visiting fellow’ is retired Brig. Gen. Michael Herzog, who since the 1990s has been a top adviser to the Israeli government and a special emissary for the Israeli Prime Minister.

BICOM has frequently offered well-paid positions to British political figures. Its present chief executive is James Sorene, who was official spokesman for Deputy Prime Minister Nick Clegg from 2011 to 2015. His predecessor was Dermot Kehoe, formerly a senior adviser to the BBC and partner of the gay Labour MP David Cairns, a former Roman Catholic priest who chaired Labour Friends of Israel.

Soon after Kehoe’s appointment, BICOM had to cope with revelations about funding supplied by Zabludowicz and other BICOM linked figures to Adam Werrity, the very close friend of Defence Secretary Liam Fox. These revelations (which H&D reported at the time) contributed to Fox’s resignation in October 2011.

Nor is Zabludowicz the only link between the Panama Papers scandal, Britain’s Prime Minister and the Zionist lobby. Prime Minister Cameron’s late father, stockbroker Ian Cameron, used Mossack Fonseca’s offshore facilities to hide the investments of Isidore Kerman, a London solicitor and fixer who was right-hand man to Mossad asset and fraudster Robert Maxwell from his earliest days in business.

Kerman had been an influential operative for international Zionism since the 1930s, and was a business partner of chief Scotland Yard detective Sir Ronald Howe.

‘Anti-fascist’ cleric exposed as pervert

The front page of today’s Mail on Sunday exposes the Rev. Paul Flowers – former chairman of the Co-operative Bank – as a perverted drug abuser.

Nationalist activists in the North of England have been aware of Rev. Flowers for more than 20 years: he has frequently pontificated against “racism” in his role as a borough councillor, first in Rochdale and later in Bradford.

The main reason why Flowers involved himself in purchasing hard drugs – including cocaine, crystal meth and ketamine – was to ingratiate himself with young men whom he was grooming for sex.  The Mail on Sunday‘s revelations come from a 26-year-old homosexual whom 63-year-old Flowers had met via a “gay dating” website.  In one text message to this man, Rev. Flowers promised that a party he was planning was “turning into a two day, drug fuelled gay orgy!!!”

He was as good as his word, as the newspaper documents.

From 2010 until May 2013 Rev. Flowers earned £132,000 a year as chairman of the Co-op Bank, which had to be rescued by City institutions earlier this year after losing £700 million in six months.

In 2010 Rev. Flowers was appointed to the Finance and Industry Board of the Labour Party.  At the 2010 Labour Party Conference in Manchester he spoke on a specialist panel discussing “The Challenge for Financial Services: Helping the UK Economy Grow”, alongside Chris Leslie, who is now Shadow Chief Secretary to the Treasury on Ed Miliband’s front bench team.  Rev. Flowers is also a trustee of the AIDS charity the Terrence Higgins Trust.

Journalists are now understood to be re-examining the past role of Rev. Flowers as a Labour councillor in Rochdale, where he was vice-chairman of the council’s social services committee during a notorious investigation of child abuse more than twenty years ago. The town’s MP at the time was Sir Cyril Smith, a notorious paedophile whose abuse of young boys in Rochdale care homes was known back in the 1970s but has only recently been exposed by the national media.

Rev. Flowers’s own conviction for gross indecency came to light as long ago as 1990.  He had been fined by magistrates nine years earlier after committing the offence in a public lavatory in Southampton.  Click here to view a PDF of a 1990 article about the case.

This sordid record appears not to have concerned either the Methodist Church, the Labour Party or the Co-operative Bank.  Rev. Flowers himself had the chutzpah to write to The Guardian in November 2003 lambasting an Anglican archbishop for his comments about homosexuality.

On that occasion Rev. Flowers wrote: “sometimes truth is more important than weight of numbers”.  Quite so, and the truth about this obese, drug peddling pervert is now out!

 

 

The Preston Mafia exposed

The England First Party has made political corruption in Preston a major campaign issue in the 2012 local elections.  Leaflets have gone out in the past week across Ribbleton ward highlighting the case of Frank McGrath, former deputy leader of Preston City Council, who in March 2010 was convicted of laundering money for a major drug trafficker and jailed for four and a half years.

Our leaflet, published in support of Mark Cotterill, the EFP’s anti-corruption candidate for Ribbleton, pointed out that McGrath – who was one of the leaders of the “Preston Mafia” whose influence extended across much of Lancashire  – had been ordered to pay almost £1 million.  This represented profits from criminal activity.

Today that anti-corruption campaign has been dramatically vindicated, as former councillor McGrath has been ordered to spend a further two years in jail.  He still owes more than £400,000 of his ill-gotten criminal loot.

The England First Party calls for a full inquiry into Labour’s “Preston Mafia” and the web of corruption that Lancashire police tried but failed to uproot during the 1990s.  Both the Labour and Conservative parties have questions to answer about this corruption scandal – especially with a new Lancashire Police Commissioner due to be elected later this year.

Click here for a full investigation of the Preston Mafia, which will be extended later this week.

England First Party exposes Preston Mafia

2012 is a Guild year in Preston – a year when Prestonians are meant to be proud of their home city.  Preston Guild is a unique civic celebration, held every twenty years since 1328.

Yet this year there is a shadow over Preston Guild – a ghost at the feast.

For the record of the man who was Preston’s Guild Mayor at the last festivities, and who had led the City Council for the previous decade – the late Cllr Harold Parker – is again under scrutiny as part of an investigation into what was termed the “Preston Mafia”, a description coined not by political opponents but by his own Borough Treasurer!

The England First Party believes that both the Labour and Conservative Parties have serious questions to answer about corruption and political chicanery in Preston, and that a full enquiry is needed to get to the bottom of the scandal.

—–

On 24th April 2012 the disgraced Labour politician Frank McGrath was ordered to serve a further two year prison sentence, after failing to obey a court order to repay almost £1 million of the proceeds from his life of crime.  This in itself might seem bad enough: but to understand the full dimensions of the affair we must look back to 7th August 1991, when a team of twenty Lancashire Police detectives carried out simultaneous raids across Preston.

The targets of these police raids included Preston Town Hall and the homes and offices of Cllr Harold Parker, leader of the council since 1982, and his deputy Cllr Frank McGrath.

Rumours had been circulating for years about the improper business relationship between these two senior Preston councillors and Owen Oyston, a millionaire businessman and supporter of the Labour Party, featured as early as March 1984 in an investigation by the BBC’s Watchdog programme.   A particular focus of these investigations was the redevelopment of Preston Docks.

Cllr Harold Parker effectively controlled Preston Council’s decisions over the dockland development while being paid a £450 monthly retainer by Oyston, who had a major financial interest in the project, and receiving numerous other benefits in kind from Oyston interests.  Meanwhile his deputy leader Cllr McGrath became a millionaire in 1987 through his investment in Oyston’s company Red Rose Radio, which owned local radio stations in Preston, Manchester, Leeds and Cardiff.

The police raids in 1991 were codenamed ‘Operation Angel’ and led to criminal charges against Frank McGrath and several of Preston Council’s most senior officials, including the chief executive and deputy chief executive.  Also raided were the offices of Tustin Developments, a company owned by Iranian exile Hossein Ghiassi and his California-based brother, who had won substantial contracts for the Preston Docklands project.

Frank McGrath was charged with multiple counts of fraud and theft in January 1992.  Yet despite millions of pounds being spent on ‘Operation Angel’, his trial and almost all of the subsequent ones collapsed.  It now seems that the interests of justice took second place to political machinations.  Much of the campaign against Owen Oyston and his corrupt Labour cronies had been funded and organised secretly by prominent Conservatives, notably:

• Lord Blaker, former Conservative MP for Blackpool South, who served as a Foreign Office and Defence minister in Mrs Thatcher’s governments during the 1980s.  He died in 2009.
• Sir Robert Atkins, Conservative MP for Preston North from 1979 to 1997 and an MEP for North West England from 1999 to 2009.
• Bill Harrison, property tycoon and millionaire Tory donor who regularly hosted Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher at his Preston home during her visits to the North West.  He died in August 1999.  (Like his arch-enemy Frank McGrath, Mr Harrison lived in the affluent Preston suburb of Fulwood, though in even grander style at Greyfriars Hall.)

This Tory trio worked through local Preston residents activist Michael Murrin and Blackpool based private detective Chris More, who managed to access the confidential bank and income tax details of Cllrs Parker and McGrath.  Yet when it came to prosecuting the targets of Operation Angel, the Tory party at national level proved most unhelpful, as did some very senior police officers.

Mrs Thatcher’s Attorney General Nicholas Lyell prevented the release of files implicating Balfour Beatty, the construction giant and major Tory donor, in the web of corruption surrounding the Preston Docklands development.  This was very good news for Labour’s Cllr Frank McGrath, as it seriously handicapped the Operation Angel investigation into his affairs.

Fortunately for McGrath, although the Conservative Party were no friends of his, they were on very friendly terms indeed with Balfour Beatty, which had been founded a century ago by the Conservative MP for Hampstead, George Balfour, and retained close links to the Tories.  Operation Angel happened to coincide with the controversy over the construction of the Pergau Dam in Malaysia, with more than £200 million of British taxpayers money authorised by Foreign Secretary Douglas Hurd.  A judicial review later found that Hurd had acted unlawfully in approving the Pergau project, which was being constructed by Balfour Beatty and another company with strong Tory connections – Cementation International, employers of the Prime Minister’s son, Mark Thatcher.

So although Balfour Beatty’s own offices had been raided and police had discovered a payment of £140,000 from Balfour Beatty to Cllr Frank McGrath’s Isle of Man company bank account ‘Global Enterprises’, Attorney General Sir Nicholas Lyell decided at the end of 1993 to drop all aspects of the case that involved this major Tory donor.  Cllr McGrath arrogantly told the press: “I offered no comment to the police when they questioned me and I understand the company did the same.”

No doubt Balfour Beatty were relieved when they were able to resolve their own embarrassing involvement in the Preston Docklands scandal by paying back £1.3 million to Preston Council in 1998.

Owen Oyston might have thought he had escaped the long arm of the law with the collapse of Operation Angel, but justice caught up with him in May 1996 when he was convicted of rape.  Oyston’s friend Peter Martin, a former policeman, had regularly supplied girls from his model agency.  One of them – a 16 year old girl – was raped by Oyston, who was jailed for six years.  Later that year Peter Martin was jailed for 20 years after admitting a series of rapes and assaults on young girls recruited through his model agency.

Cllr Frank McGrath went on to become Chief Executive of the Oyston owned Blackpool Football Club, and it took a few more years for his luck to run out.  During 2003 McGrath met convicted criminal Silvano Turchet, who was on day release from a prison sentence.   McGrath described himself as an accountant and business adviser, though he had no accountancy qualifications.  Nevertheless for some reason Turchet decided that McGrath was the ideal man to help him with his next business enterprise.

This turned out to be the large scale importation of heroin, which Turchet brought in via a private plane, flying into a small wartime airfield at Sleap, Shropshire.  In May 2006 Turchet was caught red-handed when police raided the airfield and found him about to unload a cargo including heroin, cocaine and ecstasy.  He is now serving a 21-year prison sentence.

During 2004 and 2005 McGrath had laundered hundreds of thousands of pounds of drug money for Turchet.  Despite claiming that he was entirely ignorant of the source of these funds, McGrath was convicted of money laundering in February 2010 and given a four-and-a-half year prison sentence.

Ian Cruxton of the Serious Organised Crime Agency (SOCA) commented:

“Serious organised criminals are motivated by money which buys them lifestyle and influence. Those who help them through money laundering enable the profits of crime to be invested in further criminal activity and this affects us all.
“SOCA doesn’t stop when it has caught and convicted the criminals. We will go after their wealth and we are determined to make sure they can’t use it or enjoy it.”

This SOCA policy led to the current attempts to recoup some of Frank McGrath’s ill-gotten gains.  He was ordered to repay £925,000 and this week failed to do so, resulting in an additional two year prison sentence.

Yet many Prestonians are left wondering whether justice was really done over Operation Angel twenty years ago, when Frank McGrath and others succeeded in escaping jail.  His old boss Cllr Harold Parker was never prosecuted, despite extensive investigations into his role as Owen Oyston’s representative during the Docklands development.

Cllr Parker retired from Preston City Council in 2009 due to ill health and died a few months later, after 45 years on the city council and its predecessor, Preston County Borough.  He was made an Honorary Alderman, after previously being awarded the Freedom of the City and given the title “Guild Burgess”, which dates back to a 12th century award to Preston by King Henry II.  Cllr Parker’s portrait hangs in the Town Hall, a public insult to anyone who cares about honesty in public life.

If Preston council tax payers are to have confidence in their political representatives and their police force, it is time for the criminal career of Frank McGrath and his cronies – whether Labour councillors or Tory businessmen – to be fully investigated by an independent inquiry.

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