The Information Commission and the Leveson Inquiry

[Ian Batten]

Leveson Inquiry, witness statement of Alex Owens, Senior Investigating Officer at the ICO, 1999--2005.

http://www.levesoninquiry.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2011/11/Witness-Statement-of-Alexander-Owens1.pdf

He claims that he had a complete paper trail from journalists through PIs to their corrupt sources, but was told by Richard Thomas to keep his hands off the papers.   Paragraphs 4.4 to 4.9 are absolutely devastating, along with paragraphs 5.1 through 5.6.  Owens essentially accuses Thomas and his subordinates  of being too frightened to take on the newspapers, and of then being dishonest about the state of the investigation and the quality of the evidence available to them.  Paragraphs 5.10 et seq implicitly accuse the ICO of misleading Parliament.

The ICO will be giving evidence on Monday.  It will be interesting.

ian


-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://www.chiark.greenend.org.uk/pipermail/ukcrypto/attachments/20111130/4b2e9b26/attachment.htm>