Operation Tempura case not over, says Smith

(CNS): Despite calls from the elected government to close down the protracted investigation surrounding the allegations of an unlawful entry in to the Cayman Net News offices, which has so far failed to reveal any evidence of serious wrong doing against the RCIPS, Acting Commissioner James Smith has said that the Operation Tempura investigation would continue and that it could not be closed down.

The case which has been termed Netnewsgate, which that brought Martin Bridger and his Special Police Investigation Team to the Cayman Island in the first place and recently led to CI$1.275 million being awarded in damages to Justice Alex Henderson, is a very complex case which has not ended, said Smith.

He confirmed that John Jones had recently been interviewed but he said the Chief Superintendent still remained suspended from duty on full pay as he has for the last year. He also said that the team still wanted to interview former Police Commissioner Stuart Kernohan, and he confirmed that the case against Lyndon Martin was set for trial in March. He would not, however, give anymore details of the substance of the whole investigation.

“Charges have been laid in some areas of this, enquiries are ongoing in other areas and files currently sit with the Solicitor General about how they will proceed with things in court. I don’t think it is appropriate for me to comment on speculation,” Smith said, adding that there was business to be finished regarding that incident.

He said that he would not rule in or out the possibility of Jones returning to his job, and he said that it would depend on the evidence whether he would face criminal charges or a disciplinary hearing.

In recent weeks and months, most of the elected Cabinet members have voiced their very serious concerns about this element of the investigation in terms of both the length of the enquiry – more than sixteen months — and its cost, which is in excess of $4 million, without revealing any evidence of a crime. At the most recent Cabinet press briefing, the leader of government business said that the government was no longer prepared to appropriate funds for this investigation while Bridger remained the lead investigator and with no evidence that a crime actually occurred.

The governor was forced to use his reserve powers to get the funding from the Cayman treasury to pay Justice Henderson’s damages and to acquire more money for Operation Tempura. Henderson was unlawfully arrested by Bridger and SPIT as a result of suggestions that the Judge had been making inappropriate enquiries about letters written to Net News that undermined the local judiciary.

Trying to explain the reason why the whole enquiry surrounding Net News was taking so long and costing so much, Smith said that on the face of it the incident might appear straight forward, but it had tentacles and no one could have envisaged where the investigation may have gone. But he said he did not want to speculate or comment about the enquiry as it was still ongoing. He did say that operations that begin as covert investigations, as this one did, by their very nature can take much longer to come to a conclusion.

Although Smith would not be drawn on details, it is understood that the investigation surrounds whether or not Kernohan and Jones acted inappropriately regarding Martin’s entry into the offices of Net News. Martin was at the time a journalist with the paper when, allegedly, his suspicions and those of his former colleague John Evans, were raised that the newspaper proprietor Desmond Seales could be in a corrupt relationship with Deputy Commissioner Anthony Ennis.

As a result the two journalists reported their suspicions to the police and then attempted to find evidence of these suspicions in Seales’ office by entering their work place late at night. Since then, Bridger has declared that there is no truth to the rumour of a corrupt relationship between Seales and Ennis, something which he says was apparent early in the investigation.

Bridger then switched his attention to Jones and Kernohan and the two reporters. Since October 2007, he and SPIT have been pursing the idea that the allegations by Martin were not only false but malicious and that Kernohan and Joneshave misconducted themselves in some way by assisting with the search for evidence. However, it appears that that Larry Covington, who is responsible for UK Overseas Territories police services in the Caribbean, Attorney General Sam Bulgin and Governor Stuart Jack were all aware of the situation from the very beginning when Martin and Evans made the accusations against Ennis.

In two important legal rulings in February and March 2008, Chief Justice Anthony Smellie made it clear that he could see no evidence of either officer acting unlawfully and that they had a duty to investigate what they perceived to be possibly legitimate allegations. In both rulings Smellie had refused to sign warrants for Bridger to search the homes of either Kernohan or Jones because of the lack of evidence of any unlawful intent.

The only charges brought so far in the sixteen-month investigation into this case are those against Martin, which have already been reduced from the original 17 counts that he faced when arrested in March of last year to the two counts he will face in court next month, both of which are concerned with making false allegations against a police officer. The primary prosecution witness against Martin is believed to be Evans, who has not been charged despite supporting Martin in his suspicions that Seales was being leaked police information, possibly through Ennis.

However, Evans who now resides in the UK, has since declared that his testimony regarding the alleged unlawful entry was taken under duress, although he has not explained the circumstances of that “duress” and says he will be resisting the summons to attend Martin’s trial as a witness for the prosecution. When asked about this, Smith said he could not speculate on the importance of Evans to the case against Martin as he had simply not been involved in the investigation long enough.