A new disgrace in the €16.4 million
police investigation into the
disappearance of Madeleine McCann
has erupted in the British media.
It now appears that the Operation
Grange ‘Maddie probe’ has involved
the hiring of private investigators
from firms that were actually being
investigated by the Serious Fraud
Office for “allegedly overcharging”
the British government.
According to a report in the Sunday
Times, both firms were under
suspicion of putting in bogus
charges for the electronic tagging
of released prisoners who were
either “dead, back in prison or had
fled the country”.
One of the companies, G4S, has
“since repaid more than €130 million
to the Treasury” over the scandal,
but it is still another low moment
for the Metropolitan Police which
has come under enormous criticism
for spending so much money on the
Maddie investigation over the past
eight-plus years, without coming up
with one single charge or provable
theory.
According to stories in the media
today, “up to 81 officers from
private security firm G4S were
recruited to assist Operation Grange
- even though at one stage 31
detectives were assigned to work on
the case full-time”.
G4S was also involved in Operations
Yewtree, the Met’s child sex abuse
inquiry, and Withern - a probe into
the 2011 London riots. But it is the
Maddie angle that has inflamed
tabloid media, as it centres on the
“failed” aspects of police
investigations this far, and how
much they have cost the British
taxpayer.
The information emerged as a result
of documents obtained under Freedom
of Information laws, explained the
Sunday Times, quoting shadow police
minister Jack Dromey as saying: “The
public will be rightly concerned at
the creeping privatisation of core
police functions and that the
policing of their communities is
being increasingly handed over to
private companies”.
Where the revelations will leave the
already “drastically scaled down”
Maddie investigation is anyone’s
guess. Here in Portugal, the PJ’s
parallel investigation remains
ongoing, although not exclusively
focused on finding the British
toddler who disappeared without
trace from a holiday apartment in
Praia da Luz in May 2007.
As a police source told us late last
year, the case has been “worrying,
because in most cases where no-one
is arrested or charged, we know what
happened, we just can’t prove it.
“But in this case, rigorously, there
is no definitive idea on what
happened. We don’t know a thing”.
As Sky News Martin Brunt said on air
last October, “it is a case of £10
million spent and nothing achieved”.
Since then, the investigation’s
total expenditure has increased,
with the figure of €16.4 million due
to be reached by April this year.
natasha.donn@algarveresident.com
