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commentsMadeleine clues hidden for 5 years
27 October 2013
The Sunday Times
Sunday Times Insight team
The new prime suspect was first singled out by detectives in 2008. Their findings were suppressed. Insight reports
Madeleine disappeared from the Praia da Luz resort in May 2007Madeleine disappeared from the Praia da Luz resort in May 2007 (Adrian Sheratt)
THE critical new evidence at the centre of Scotland Yard’s search for Madeleine McCann was kept secret for five years after it was presented to her parents by ex-MI5 investigators.
The evidence was in fact taken from an intelligence report produced for Gerry and Kate McCann by a firm of former spies in 2008.
It contained crucial E-Fits of a man seen carrying a child on the night of Madeleine’s disappearance, which have only this month become public after he was identified as the prime suspect by Scotland Yard.
A team of hand-picked former MI5 agents had been hired by the McCanns to chase a much-needed breakthrough in the search for their missing daughter Madeleine.
10 months after the three-year-old had disappeared from the Portuguese resort of Praia da Luz, and the McCanns were beginning to despair over the handling of the local police investigation. They were relying on the new team to bring fresh hope.
But within months the relationship had soured. A report produced by the investigators was deemed “hypercritical” of the McCanns and their friends, and the authors were threatened with legal action if it was made public. Its contents remained secret until Scotland Yard detectives conducting a fresh review of the case contacted the authors and asked for a copy.
They found that it contained new evidence about a key suspect seen carrying a child away from the McCanns’ holiday apartment on the night Madeleine disappeared.
This sighting is now considered the main lead in the investigation and E-Fits of the suspect, taken from the report, were the centrepiece of a Crimewatch appeal that attracted more than 2,400 calls from the public this month.
One of the investigators whose work was sidelined said last week he was “utterly stunned” when he watched the programme and saw the evidence his team had passed to the McCanns five years ago presented as a breakthrough.
The team of investigators from the security firm Oakley International were hired by the McCanns’ Find Madeleine fund, which bankrolled private investigations into the girl’s disappearance. They were led by Henri Exton, MI5’s former undercover operations chief.
Their report, seen by The Sunday Times, focused on a sighting by an Irish family of a man carrying a child at about 10pm on May 3, 2007, when Madeleine went missing.
An earlier sighting by one of the McCanns’ friends was dismissed as less credible after “serious inconsistencies” were found in her evidence. The report also raised questions about “anomalies” in the statements given by the McCanns and their friends.
Exton confirmed last week that the fund had silenced his investigators for years after they handed over their controversial findings. He said: “A letter came from their lawyers binding us to the confidentiality of the report.”
He claimed the legal threat had prevented him from handing over the report to Scotland Yard’s fresh investigation, until detectives had obtained written permission from the fund.
A source close to the fund said the report was considered “hypercritical of the people involved” and “would have been completely distracting” if it became public.
Kate and Gerry McCann: now officially not suspects, say the Portuguese authoritiesKate and Gerry McCann: now officially not suspects, say the Portuguese authorities (Adrian Sheratt)
Oakley’s six-month investigation included placing undercover agents inside the Ocean Club where the family stayed, lie detector tests, covert surveillance and a forensic re-examination of all existing evidence.
It was immediately clear that two sightings of vital importance had been reported to the police. Two men were seen carrying children near the apartments between 9pm, when Madeleine was last seen by Gerry, and 10pm, when Kate discovered her missing.
The first man was seen at 9.15pm by Jane Tanner, a friend of the McCanns, who had been dining with them at the tapas bar in the resort. She saw a man carrying a girl just yards from the apartment as she went to check on her children.
The second sighting was by Martin Smith and his family from Ireland, who saw a man carrying a child near the apartment just before 10pm.
The earlier Tanner sighting had always been treated as the most significant, but the Oakley team controversially poured cold water on her account.
Instead, they focused on the Smith sighting, travelling to Ireland to interview the family and produce E-Fits of the man they saw. Their report said the Smiths were “helpful and sincere” and concluded: “The Smith sighting is credible evidence of a sighting of Maddie and more credible than Jane Tanner’s sighting”. The evidence had been “neglected for too long” and an “overemphasis placed on Tanner”.
The new focus shifted the believed timeline of the abduction back by 45 minutes.
The pictures of a man who may have taken Madeleine were drawn up in 2008 The pictures of a man who may have taken Madeleine were drawn up in 2008 (Adrian Sheratt)
The report, delivered to the McCanns in November 2008, recommended that the revised timeline should be the basis for future investigations and that the Smith E-Fits should be released without delay.
The potential abductor seen by the Smiths is now the prime suspect in Scotland Yard’s investigation, after detectives established that the man seen earlier by Tanner was almost certainly a father carrying his child home from a nearby night creche. The Smith E-Fits were the centrepiece of the Crimewatch appeal.
One of the Oakley investigators said last week: “I was absolutely stunned when I watched the programme . . . It most certainly wasn’t a new timeline and it certainly isn’t a new revelation. It is absolute nonsense to suggest either of those things . . . And those E-Fits you saw on Crimewatch are ours,” he said.
The detailed images of the face of the man seen by the Smith family were never released by the McCanns. But an artist’s impression of the man seen earlier by Tanner was widely promoted, even though the face had to be left blank because she had only seen him fleetingly and from a distance.
Various others images of lone men spotted hanging around the resort at other times were also released.
Nor were the Smith E-Fits included in Kate McCann’s 2011 book, Madeleine, which contained a whole section on eight “key sightings” and identified those of the Smiths and Tanner as most “crucial”. Descriptions of all seven other sightings were accompanied by an E-Fit or artist’s impression. The Smiths’ were the only exception. So why was such a “crucial” piece of evidence kept under lock and key?
The relationship between the fund and Oakley was already souring by the time the report was submitted — and its findings could only have made matters worse.
As well as questioning parts of the McCanns’ evidence, it contained sensitive information about Madeleine’s sleeping patterns and raised the highly sensitive possibility that she could have died in an accident after leaving the apartment herself from one of two unsecured doors.
There was also an uncomfortable complication with Smith’s account. He had originally told the police that he had “recognised something” about the way Gerry McCann carried one of his children which reminded him of the man he had seen in Praia da Luz.
Smith has since stressed that he does not believe the man he saw was Gerry, and Scotland Yard do not consider this a possibility. Last week the McCanns were told officially by the Portuguese authorities that they are not suspects.
The McCanns were also understandably wary of Oakley after allegations that the chairman, Kevin Halligen, failed to pass on money paid by the fund to Exton’s team. Halligen denies this. He was later convicted of fraud in an unrelated case in the US.
The McCann fund source said the Oakley report was passed on to new private investigators after the contract ended, but that the firm’s work was considered “contaminated” by the financial dispute.
He said the fund wanted to continue to pursue information about the man seen by Tanner, and it would have been too expensive to investigate both sightings in full — so the Smith E-Fits were not publicised. It was also considered necessary to threaten legal action against the authors.
“[The report] was hypercritical of the people involved . . . It just wouldn’t be conducive to the investigation to have that report publicly declared because . . . the newspapers would have been all over it. And it would have been completely distracting,” said the source.
A statement released by the Find Madeleine fund said that “all information privately gathered during the search for Madeleine has been fully acted upon where necessary” and had been passed to Scotland Yard.
It continued: “Throughout the investigation, the Find Madeleine fund’s sole priority has been, and remains, to find Madeleine and bring her home as swiftly as possible.”
Insight: Heidi Blake and Jonathan Calvert
Continue Reading...
The Sunday Times
Sunday Times Insight team
The new prime suspect was first singled out by detectives in 2008. Their findings were suppressed. Insight reports
Madeleine disappeared from the Praia da Luz resort in May 2007Madeleine disappeared from the Praia da Luz resort in May 2007 (Adrian Sheratt)
THE critical new evidence at the centre of Scotland Yard’s search for Madeleine McCann was kept secret for five years after it was presented to her parents by ex-MI5 investigators.
The evidence was in fact taken from an intelligence report produced for Gerry and Kate McCann by a firm of former spies in 2008.
It contained crucial E-Fits of a man seen carrying a child on the night of Madeleine’s disappearance, which have only this month become public after he was identified as the prime suspect by Scotland Yard.
A team of hand-picked former MI5 agents had been hired by the McCanns to chase a much-needed breakthrough in the search for their missing daughter Madeleine.
10 months after the three-year-old had disappeared from the Portuguese resort of Praia da Luz, and the McCanns were beginning to despair over the handling of the local police investigation. They were relying on the new team to bring fresh hope.
But within months the relationship had soured. A report produced by the investigators was deemed “hypercritical” of the McCanns and their friends, and the authors were threatened with legal action if it was made public. Its contents remained secret until Scotland Yard detectives conducting a fresh review of the case contacted the authors and asked for a copy.
They found that it contained new evidence about a key suspect seen carrying a child away from the McCanns’ holiday apartment on the night Madeleine disappeared.
This sighting is now considered the main lead in the investigation and E-Fits of the suspect, taken from the report, were the centrepiece of a Crimewatch appeal that attracted more than 2,400 calls from the public this month.
One of the investigators whose work was sidelined said last week he was “utterly stunned” when he watched the programme and saw the evidence his team had passed to the McCanns five years ago presented as a breakthrough.
The team of investigators from the security firm Oakley International were hired by the McCanns’ Find Madeleine fund, which bankrolled private investigations into the girl’s disappearance. They were led by Henri Exton, MI5’s former undercover operations chief.
Their report, seen by The Sunday Times, focused on a sighting by an Irish family of a man carrying a child at about 10pm on May 3, 2007, when Madeleine went missing.
An earlier sighting by one of the McCanns’ friends was dismissed as less credible after “serious inconsistencies” were found in her evidence. The report also raised questions about “anomalies” in the statements given by the McCanns and their friends.
Exton confirmed last week that the fund had silenced his investigators for years after they handed over their controversial findings. He said: “A letter came from their lawyers binding us to the confidentiality of the report.”
He claimed the legal threat had prevented him from handing over the report to Scotland Yard’s fresh investigation, until detectives had obtained written permission from the fund.
A source close to the fund said the report was considered “hypercritical of the people involved” and “would have been completely distracting” if it became public.
Kate and Gerry McCann: now officially not suspects, say the Portuguese authoritiesKate and Gerry McCann: now officially not suspects, say the Portuguese authorities (Adrian Sheratt)
Oakley’s six-month investigation included placing undercover agents inside the Ocean Club where the family stayed, lie detector tests, covert surveillance and a forensic re-examination of all existing evidence.
It was immediately clear that two sightings of vital importance had been reported to the police. Two men were seen carrying children near the apartments between 9pm, when Madeleine was last seen by Gerry, and 10pm, when Kate discovered her missing.
The first man was seen at 9.15pm by Jane Tanner, a friend of the McCanns, who had been dining with them at the tapas bar in the resort. She saw a man carrying a girl just yards from the apartment as she went to check on her children.
The second sighting was by Martin Smith and his family from Ireland, who saw a man carrying a child near the apartment just before 10pm.
The earlier Tanner sighting had always been treated as the most significant, but the Oakley team controversially poured cold water on her account.
Instead, they focused on the Smith sighting, travelling to Ireland to interview the family and produce E-Fits of the man they saw. Their report said the Smiths were “helpful and sincere” and concluded: “The Smith sighting is credible evidence of a sighting of Maddie and more credible than Jane Tanner’s sighting”. The evidence had been “neglected for too long” and an “overemphasis placed on Tanner”.
The new focus shifted the believed timeline of the abduction back by 45 minutes.
The pictures of a man who may have taken Madeleine were drawn up in 2008 The pictures of a man who may have taken Madeleine were drawn up in 2008 (Adrian Sheratt)
The report, delivered to the McCanns in November 2008, recommended that the revised timeline should be the basis for future investigations and that the Smith E-Fits should be released without delay.
The potential abductor seen by the Smiths is now the prime suspect in Scotland Yard’s investigation, after detectives established that the man seen earlier by Tanner was almost certainly a father carrying his child home from a nearby night creche. The Smith E-Fits were the centrepiece of the Crimewatch appeal.
One of the Oakley investigators said last week: “I was absolutely stunned when I watched the programme . . . It most certainly wasn’t a new timeline and it certainly isn’t a new revelation. It is absolute nonsense to suggest either of those things . . . And those E-Fits you saw on Crimewatch are ours,” he said.
The detailed images of the face of the man seen by the Smith family were never released by the McCanns. But an artist’s impression of the man seen earlier by Tanner was widely promoted, even though the face had to be left blank because she had only seen him fleetingly and from a distance.
Various others images of lone men spotted hanging around the resort at other times were also released.
Nor were the Smith E-Fits included in Kate McCann’s 2011 book, Madeleine, which contained a whole section on eight “key sightings” and identified those of the Smiths and Tanner as most “crucial”. Descriptions of all seven other sightings were accompanied by an E-Fit or artist’s impression. The Smiths’ were the only exception. So why was such a “crucial” piece of evidence kept under lock and key?
The relationship between the fund and Oakley was already souring by the time the report was submitted — and its findings could only have made matters worse.
As well as questioning parts of the McCanns’ evidence, it contained sensitive information about Madeleine’s sleeping patterns and raised the highly sensitive possibility that she could have died in an accident after leaving the apartment herself from one of two unsecured doors.
There was also an uncomfortable complication with Smith’s account. He had originally told the police that he had “recognised something” about the way Gerry McCann carried one of his children which reminded him of the man he had seen in Praia da Luz.
Smith has since stressed that he does not believe the man he saw was Gerry, and Scotland Yard do not consider this a possibility. Last week the McCanns were told officially by the Portuguese authorities that they are not suspects.
The McCanns were also understandably wary of Oakley after allegations that the chairman, Kevin Halligen, failed to pass on money paid by the fund to Exton’s team. Halligen denies this. He was later convicted of fraud in an unrelated case in the US.
The McCann fund source said the Oakley report was passed on to new private investigators after the contract ended, but that the firm’s work was considered “contaminated” by the financial dispute.
He said the fund wanted to continue to pursue information about the man seen by Tanner, and it would have been too expensive to investigate both sightings in full — so the Smith E-Fits were not publicised. It was also considered necessary to threaten legal action against the authors.
“[The report] was hypercritical of the people involved . . . It just wouldn’t be conducive to the investigation to have that report publicly declared because . . . the newspapers would have been all over it. And it would have been completely distracting,” said the source.
A statement released by the Find Madeleine fund said that “all information privately gathered during the search for Madeleine has been fully acted upon where necessary” and had been passed to Scotland Yard.
It continued: “Throughout the investigation, the Find Madeleine fund’s sole priority has been, and remains, to find Madeleine and bring her home as swiftly as possible.”
Insight: Heidi Blake and Jonathan Calvert
Labels:
2013,
Find Madeleine Fund,
Henri Exton,
Madeleine McCann,
MI5,
Oakley Intl
Irish conman to be deported over $2m fraud
01 July 2013
Irish Examiner
John Breslin
An Irish conman who penetrated the inner circles of Washington DC society is to be deported from the US immediately, after being sentenced to more than time served for a $2m fraud.
A judge has ordered Kevin Richard Halligen to be deported, likely to Ireland as US officials are working off an Irish passport, though the man himself insists he is an Englishman.
If sent to Britain, he could find himself being questioned over vast sums of money handed to him by a fund set up to search for Madeleine McCann and for which little work appeared to be done.
Halligen, from a working class south Dublin family who spoke with a high-class English accent and told people he was a spy, pleaded guilty last month to one count of fraud, stealing $2.1m (€1.6m) from a Dutch firm that hired him to help release two missing executives.
It was only a fraction of the $12m total Halligen’s firm was paid to find the pair, employees of Trafigura, whose executives had been taken captive in the Ivory Coast after they travelled to the country in response to a tanker spill off the coast.
Instead of using the money to grease the wheels of the Capitol as promised, the 51-year-old within days bought a $1.6m house for himself and his fiancée in Crystal Falls, Virginia, outside Washington.
In court on Thursday, Halligen spoke publicly for the first time since his late-2009 arrest in Britain, where he landed ahead of being charged in a Washington DC federal court.
Appealing for leniency, Halligen said at his sentencing he takes “full responsibility” for his actions.
He said although he misused the $2.1m payment, the rest of the money did fund more than 30 contractors whom he said he hired to work on Trafigura’s case.
“I want to make it clear I was not sitting on a little fortune of my own $12m,” he said, telling Judge Colleen Kollar-Kotelly: “I’m in your hands.”
While prosecutors wanted a stiffer sentence, partly because Halligen was found in a civil court of stiffing business associates of $7m, Judge Kollar-Kotelly sentenced him to the maximum 41 months under federal sentencing guidelines.
Because he has been in prison for a total 43 months in Britain fighting extradition and in the US ahead of sentencing, Halligen is essentially a free man.
But the judge made clear she wants Halligen out of the US immediately. Halligen did not disagree and asked to be deported as soon as possible.
Halligen has also been ordered to pay $2.1m in restitution but has pleaded poverty, claiming he has no assets or cash.
Halligen was known in the top restaurants — in one he spent many long days, from 11am to 4pm, drinking the most expensive wine and constantly smoking cigarettes. In another he was known as James Bond for constantly dropping hints of his clandestine life as a spy.
One friend, later a senior official in the Obama administration, who admits thoroughly enjoying many Martini-filled hours with Halligen, described how he mentioned his intelligence newsletter to the Irishman, warning it would cost him $15,000 for a subscription.
“He wrote a cheque right there at the table for $20,000,” Noel Koch, a Washington insider since the Nixon era, told the Washington Post.
Supporters of the Madeleine McCann fund believe some of the £300,000 (€350,000) funnelled to Halligen after he was hired to help find the girl paid for those boozy days in DC.
Associates who worked on the McCann case cannot recall Halligen coming up with any idea of note, citing one in which he proposed hiring a man dressed as a priest to go angling for confessions on a pub crawl around the bars of the resort where she disappeared.
Continue Reading...
Irish Examiner
John Breslin
An Irish conman who penetrated the inner circles of Washington DC society is to be deported from the US immediately, after being sentenced to more than time served for a $2m fraud.
A judge has ordered Kevin Richard Halligen to be deported, likely to Ireland as US officials are working off an Irish passport, though the man himself insists he is an Englishman.
If sent to Britain, he could find himself being questioned over vast sums of money handed to him by a fund set up to search for Madeleine McCann and for which little work appeared to be done.
Halligen, from a working class south Dublin family who spoke with a high-class English accent and told people he was a spy, pleaded guilty last month to one count of fraud, stealing $2.1m (€1.6m) from a Dutch firm that hired him to help release two missing executives.
It was only a fraction of the $12m total Halligen’s firm was paid to find the pair, employees of Trafigura, whose executives had been taken captive in the Ivory Coast after they travelled to the country in response to a tanker spill off the coast.
Instead of using the money to grease the wheels of the Capitol as promised, the 51-year-old within days bought a $1.6m house for himself and his fiancée in Crystal Falls, Virginia, outside Washington.
In court on Thursday, Halligen spoke publicly for the first time since his late-2009 arrest in Britain, where he landed ahead of being charged in a Washington DC federal court.
Appealing for leniency, Halligen said at his sentencing he takes “full responsibility” for his actions.
He said although he misused the $2.1m payment, the rest of the money did fund more than 30 contractors whom he said he hired to work on Trafigura’s case.
“I want to make it clear I was not sitting on a little fortune of my own $12m,” he said, telling Judge Colleen Kollar-Kotelly: “I’m in your hands.”
While prosecutors wanted a stiffer sentence, partly because Halligen was found in a civil court of stiffing business associates of $7m, Judge Kollar-Kotelly sentenced him to the maximum 41 months under federal sentencing guidelines.
Because he has been in prison for a total 43 months in Britain fighting extradition and in the US ahead of sentencing, Halligen is essentially a free man.
But the judge made clear she wants Halligen out of the US immediately. Halligen did not disagree and asked to be deported as soon as possible.
Halligen has also been ordered to pay $2.1m in restitution but has pleaded poverty, claiming he has no assets or cash.
Halligen was known in the top restaurants — in one he spent many long days, from 11am to 4pm, drinking the most expensive wine and constantly smoking cigarettes. In another he was known as James Bond for constantly dropping hints of his clandestine life as a spy.
One friend, later a senior official in the Obama administration, who admits thoroughly enjoying many Martini-filled hours with Halligen, described how he mentioned his intelligence newsletter to the Irishman, warning it would cost him $15,000 for a subscription.
“He wrote a cheque right there at the table for $20,000,” Noel Koch, a Washington insider since the Nixon era, told the Washington Post.
Supporters of the Madeleine McCann fund believe some of the £300,000 (€350,000) funnelled to Halligen after he was hired to help find the girl paid for those boozy days in DC.
Associates who worked on the McCann case cannot recall Halligen coming up with any idea of note, citing one in which he proposed hiring a man dressed as a priest to go angling for confessions on a pub crawl around the bars of the resort where she disappeared.
Labels:
2013,
FBI,
Fraud,
Kevin Halligen,
Madeleine McCann
Kevin Halligen:
Madeleine McCann parents may sue fraudster accused of £300,000 fund con
18 May 2013
Mirror
It is understood that Kate and Gerry McCann are now considering suing Halligen for allegedly fleecing their fund
A dodgy “detective” accused of conning £300,000 from the Madeleine McCann fund is being kicked out of the US – and could now face justice in Britain.
Kevin Halligen was extradited to America five months ago over claims he cheated former business partners out of £1.3million.
Yesterday the 51-year-old admitted wire fraud in a deal with prosecutors in Washington DC.
He will be freed from jail next month, due to time he has already served, then deported.
It is understood that Kate and Gerry McCann are now considering suing Halligen for allegedly fleecing their fund.
He could also be arrested if the couple make a formal complaint.
In 2008, Halligen’s company Oakley International signed a £500,000 deal to help find missing Madeleine.
But the Surrey-based Irishman’s contract was terminated early without full payment after fund organisers decided he had failed to fulfil the agreement.
He was then arrested in Oxford in November 2009 after fleeing Washington when the US government began seeking an indictment over the wire fraud.
A source said: “Halligen would con his own grandmother he is that ruthless.
"The fact he gave the McCanns false hope and took so much money is unforgivable.”
In Washington federal court yesterday Halligen admitted persuading the Dutch company Trafigura to send £1.3million to his personal account in 2006.
Halligen told the court he bought a luxury six-bedroom house with some of the money.
It was supposed to be used to help free two of the company’s executives who were being held in the Ivory Coast on charges of dumping toxic waste.
Halligen will be sentenced on June 27 and, under the deal, freed and deported.
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Madeleine McCann parents may sue fraudster accused of £300,000 fund con
18 May 2013
Mirror
It is understood that Kate and Gerry McCann are now considering suing Halligen for allegedly fleecing their fund
A dodgy “detective” accused of conning £300,000 from the Madeleine McCann fund is being kicked out of the US – and could now face justice in Britain.
Kevin Halligen was extradited to America five months ago over claims he cheated former business partners out of £1.3million.
Yesterday the 51-year-old admitted wire fraud in a deal with prosecutors in Washington DC.
He will be freed from jail next month, due to time he has already served, then deported.
It is understood that Kate and Gerry McCann are now considering suing Halligen for allegedly fleecing their fund.
He could also be arrested if the couple make a formal complaint.
In 2008, Halligen’s company Oakley International signed a £500,000 deal to help find missing Madeleine.
But the Surrey-based Irishman’s contract was terminated early without full payment after fund organisers decided he had failed to fulfil the agreement.
He was then arrested in Oxford in November 2009 after fleeing Washington when the US government began seeking an indictment over the wire fraud.
A source said: “Halligen would con his own grandmother he is that ruthless.
"The fact he gave the McCanns false hope and took so much money is unforgivable.”
In Washington federal court yesterday Halligen admitted persuading the Dutch company Trafigura to send £1.3million to his personal account in 2006.
Halligen told the court he bought a luxury six-bedroom house with some of the money.
It was supposed to be used to help free two of the company’s executives who were being held in the Ivory Coast on charges of dumping toxic waste.
Halligen will be sentenced on June 27 and, under the deal, freed and deported.
Labels:
2013,
Kevin Halligen,
Madeleine McCann,
Oakley Intl,
Trafigura
FBI Press Release
U.S. Attorney’s Office
May 17, 2013
District of Columbia (202) 514-7566
WASHINGTON—Kevin Richard Halligen, 51, an Irish citizen, pled guilty today to wire fraud, a federal charge stemming from a scheme in which he defrauded $2.1 million from a Netherlands-based commodities trading company, announced U.S. Attorney Ronald C. Machen Jr. and Valerie Parlave, Assistant Director in Charge of the FBI’s Washington Field Office.
Halligen pled guilty to one count of wire fraud, the first of two counts of an indictment that was returned against him in 2009 in the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia. As part of the plea agreement, the government agreed to dismiss the second count of the indictment, which was a money laundering charge stemming from the same scheme. The charge of wire fraud carries a statutory maximum of 20 years in prison and a fine of up to $250,000. Under federal sentencing guidelines, the parties agreed that Halligen’s likely range would be a prison term of 33 to 41 months and a fine between $7,500 and $75,000.
Under the plea agreement, Halligen also must pay $2.1 million in restitution to the company that was the victim of his scheme.
The Honorable Colleen Kollar-Kotelly scheduled sentencing for June 27, 2013.
The wire fraud charge stems from actions taken by Halligen in 2006 and 2007, when he was the Chief Executive Officer of Red Defence International (RDI), a London-based security consulting and crisis management firm, which was hired by Trafigura Beheer BV (Trafigura), a Netherlands-based international commodities trading company, and its London-based law firm, Waterson Hicks. Trafigura hired RDI as a consultant in crisis management after two Trafigura executives were captured and imprisoned in the Ivory Coast while visiting there for the purpose of determining the company’s next steps to address an environmental issue caused by the leakage of toxic waste material from Trafigura vessels in an Ivory Coast port.
While employed by Trafigura, Halligen claimed to have incurred $2.1 million in expenses related to pursuing a strategy in the United States aimed at convincing the United States to assist in securing the release of the Trafigura executives; in reality, Halligen spent the money on a home in Great Falls, Virginia, which was to be his personal residence, as well as other personal expenses, according to the government’s evidence.
“This CEO exploited a company desperate to secure the release of its executives from a foreign prison,” said U.S. Attorney Machen. “He conned the company out of $2 million he claimed would be used to support his efforts to rescue them, but instead used the money to buy a six-bedroom mansion. The extradition and imprisonment of this CEO demonstrates the strength of our resolve to prosecute corporate fraud.”
“Instead of assisting in the release of two executives imprisoned in the Ivory Coast, Mr. Halligen utilized the money paid to him to support his own lavish lifestyle,” said Assistant Director in Charge Parlave. “Together with prosecutors, the FBI will continue to pursue individuals who devise schemes to defraud companies of money for services never provided to them.”
According to a statement of offense signed by the defendant as well as the government, at the request of Trafigura, Waterson Hicks hired RDI in October 2006 to help secure the release of two Trafigura executives who were arrested and detained in Abidjan, Ivory Coast. The arrests followed an environmental spill off the coast of Abidjan. Under a contract that took effect in October 2006, RDI was to provide security intelligence and public relations services related to Trafigura’s presence in the Ivory Coast and to assist with facilitating the release of the Trafigura executives. Under the contract with RDI, Waterson Hicks paid RDI and then, in turn, the law firm was reimbursed by Trafigura.
During November 2006, after other efforts to secure the executives’ release proved unsuccessful, Halligen suggested that the U.S. government should be involved with facilitating negotiations with the Ivory Coast. His stated strategy was to utilize his contacts in the United States to encourage Ivory Coast officials to release the executives. Halligen said the “American Strategy” would cost an additional $2.1 million, on top of the money RDI already was receiving.
The $2.1 million supposedly was to be used to pay expenses incurred by Halligen in the United States to hire consultants and lobbyists to influence officials in the United States on Trafigura’s behalf. In December 2006, Halligen was informed that the law firm had received the $2.1 million from Trafigura. Then, in January 2007, Halligen told the law firm to wire $2.1 million from their bank account in London to his personal bank account in the United States.
Between November 2006 and January 2007, Halligen traveled to the United States on numerous occasions, claiming to have met with U.S. officials in Washington, D.C., allegedly in furtherance of the “American Strategy.” While in Washington, D.C., he began dating a woman who resided in the area and subsequently became engaged to her.
Halligen gave his fianceé a $2 million budget to find a suitable house in which they would live after their marriage. Shortly thereafter, she found a six-bedroom, four-and-a-half-bathroom residence in Great Falls, Virginia. On January 11, 2007—the day after $2.1 million was wired to Halligen’s personal bank account for the American strategy—Halligen wired nearly $1.7 million from his account to complete the purchase of the Great Falls residence.
None of the proceeds from the $2.1 million payment from Waterson Hicks to RDI were ever directed toward reimbursement of expenses related to the “American Strategy.” In addition to spending nearly $1.7 million on the purchase of the Great Falls residence, the rest of the money was spent on other personal expenses.
The Trafigura executives ultimately were released in February 2007.
At the time of his indictment in November 2009, Halligen was no longer residing in the United States. On November 25, 2009, he was arrested at a hotel in Oxford, the United Kingdom, so that he could be extradited to the United States. At the time of his arrest, Halligen was using an alias. Subsequent to his arrest in the United Kingdom, Halligen litigated issues surrounding his extradition to the United States. He ultimately was extradited in December 2012.
Halligen was incarcerated in the United Kingdom from the date of his arrest in November 2009 until his extradition in December 2012. When he was presented for his initial appearance in the United States District Court for the District of Columbia, in December 2012, he was ordered to be held without bond and he has been incarcerated since that time. Halligen will continue to be incarcerated while he awaits his sentencing date.
In announcing the plea, U.S. Attorney Machen and Assistant Director in Charge Parlave commended the work of the special agents from the FBI’s Washington Field Office who handled the case. They also expressed appreciation to those who worked on the case for the U.S. Attorney’s Office, including paralegals Donna Galindo, Tasha Harris, and Krishawn Graham. Finally, they commended the efforts of Assistant U.S. Attorneys Maia L. Miller and Matt Graves, who are prosecuting the case, and former Assistant U.S. Attorney Vasu Muthyala who investigated the matter.
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Kevin Sullivan
17 May 2013
Kevin Richard Halligen, who convinced lawyers, lobbyists and others in Washington’s elite intelligence community that he was a former British spy and allegedly conned them out of millions, pleaded guilty Friday in D.C. federal court to defrauding former business associates out of $2.1 million.
“Was it your intent to defraud?” U.S. District Judge Colleen Kollar-Kotelly asked Halligen.
“It was,” replied Halligen, a former high roller who once lived for months at a time in a suite at the Willard Hotel but is now being held in a D.C. jail pending sentencing June 27.
Halligen, 51, lived in Washington and worked as a “security consultant” from 2005 to November 2008, until he drained his bank accounts and fled, leaving behind a string of creditors, from lawyers to limo drivers to housekeepers. He was arrested in Oxford, England, after a year on the run, and he was extradited to the United States in December to stand trial.
Halligen pleaded guilty Friday to defrauding Trafigura, an international company based in the Netherlands, that had hired him to help free two executives who had been arrested in Ivory Coast in 2006. The company paid Halligen about $12 million to provide “security, intelligence and public relations.”
Court documents show that Trafigura gave Halligen an additional $2.1 million in January 2007 to “hire lobbyists and influence officials in the United States on Trafigura’s behalf.” The next day, Halligen used nearly $1.7 million of that money to buy a large home with a swimming pool in Great Falls.
Halligen “exploited a company desperate to secure the release of its executives from a foreign prison,” U.S. Attorney Ronald C. Machen Jr. said in a statement. “He conned the company out of $2 million he claimed would be used to support his efforts to rescue them, but instead used the money to buy a six-bedroom mansion.”
Kollar-Kotelly told Halligen that the fraud conviction carries a maximum of 20 years in prison, but that under federal sentencing guidelines he would likely serve no more than 41 months. She also said he could be fined up to $75,000.
Halligen has been in jail for 42 months, since his November 2009 arrest in England. The U.S. attorney’s office said Halligen would be credited with time already served, which could satisfy his prison sentence.
Halligen, wearing a blue blazer, yellow tie and baggy brown pants, also agreed to pay restitution of $2.1 million to Trafigura. Federal public defender David Bos said Halligen had no assets, so he was not sure how or when Halligen could pay.
“He’s clearly done the honorable thing by pleading guilty,” said John Holmes, a retired British army general and former head of the British military’s special forces. Holmes said Halligen conned him out of thousands of dollars. “However, there is still the outstanding question of where all his money has gone,” he said.
Halligen will also likely be deported, but it was unclear to where. The U.S. attorney’s office said Halligen is an Irish citizen, but in court Friday, Halligen said he was born in Ireland but is a British citizen. Halligen told the judge he would leave the United States voluntarily.
The specific charges to which Halligen pleaded guilty are a small sliver of a wide array of civil lawsuits and allegations against him made by former friends and associates in more than 40 interviews with The Washington Post last year in Washington and London.
Owners of Washington restaurants remember him spending thousands on long, boozy days and evenings. He traveled everywhere in a chauffeured Lincoln Town Car.
His bank statements, obtained by The Post, show that clients were paying him hundreds of thousands of dollars, but he was spending the money just as fast. One restaurant owner said he and his staff called Halligen “James Bond,” because of his stories of spy derring-do and his habit of tossing around huge amounts of cash. There is no evidence that Halligen ever worked as an intelligence agent.
Of all Halligen’s excesses and deceptions, his former friends said, the most outrageous was his fake wedding. In April 2009, Halligen “married” his fiance, Maria Dybczak, a Commerce Department lawyer, at a showy ceremony at Georgetown’s grand Evermay Estate before an elite crowd of more than 100 people.
What no one knew at the time is that the minister who pronounced Halligen and his bride man and wife was actually a professional actor from Arlington’s Signature Theatre.
Friends said that shortly before the ceremony, Halligen told Dybczak that because he was an undercover agent, he couldn’t sign any public documents, including a marriage license. So rather than cancel, they hired an actor and went ahead with the sham wedding.
Two of the guests that day later sued Halligen.
Mark Aspinall, a London lawyer who had been Halligen’s connection to Trafigura, filed suit in federal court in Washington to recover money he had invested in Halligen’s company, and a judge ordered Halligen to pay back $871,000.
Halligen was also sued in Fairfax County Circuit Court by a man who gave a toast at the Evermay ceremony: Andre Hollis, a former deputy assistant secretary of defense for counter-narcotics who once worked as legal counsel to the House of Representatives.
Hollis said in court papers that Halligen hired him as chief executive of his U.S. company, Oakley International, and that Hollis bought an ownership stake in the company that turned out to be worthless, because Halligen had drained the company’s accounts. A judge ordered Halligen to pay Hollis more than $5.7 million in damages.
Halligen came to Washington from London, where a similar string of associates have accused him of conning them.
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Fraud suspect Kevin Richard Halligen allegedly posed as a spy and cheated the elite on both sides of the Atlantic
 |
| Kevin Richard Halligen |
Fraud suspect Kevin Richard Halligen allegedly posed as a spy and cheated the elite on both sides of the Atlantic
10 June 2012
Washington Post
Kevin Sullivan
(MCF Archive: http://themaddiecasefiles.com/post238543.html#p238543)
Some people knew him as Kevin. He told others he was Richard. Everyone could see he had money to burn, and most people thought he was a British spy. But nobody in Washington really knew Kevin Richard Halligen, not even the woman he pretended to marry.
Halligen now sits in a London prison, fighting extradition to the United States, where he faces felony fraud charges stemming from his days of extravagant living in Washington high society.
For about three years, until 2008, Halligen spent hundreds of thousands of dollars living large in Washington. He stayed in a Willard Hotel suite for months at a time and drank the days away at pricey Georgetown restaurants. He traveled everywhere in a chauffeur-driven Lincoln Town Car, set up high-tech offices in Herndon and bought a grand home in Great Falls.
Smart, charming and favoring black turtlenecks and sunglasses, Halligen told everyone that he was a spy, or a former spy, or connected to spies. He told friends that he was under such deep cover that he took over his fiancee’s place as a “safe house.”
Virtually all of it, it turns out, was fabricated or exaggerated, according to associates who have since investigated his background. But with amazing ease and a perfect British accent, the diminutive Halligen schmoozed his way into Washington’s intelligence elite — Pentagon officials, influential lawyers and lobbyists, former CIA operatives.
And he took their money.
He set up shop as a corporate security consultant, offering his dubious “operational experience” in intelligence to solve delicate problems for customers working in dangerous places.
In a capital with a long history of spies, foreigners with shadowy backgrounds, big talkers and charlatans, Halligen didn’t set off any alarm bells at first, according to former associates. But that changed when they concluded that Halligen was taking money and not doing the work he promised.
The U.S. government obtained an indictment against him in 2009 on criminal charges of bilking a client out of $2.1 million, and judges in the District and Virginia have ordered him to pay $6.5 million to former partners who claim he fleeced them.
Halligen, through his London lawyer, declined to comment as he fights extradition to the United States in British courts.
But in dozens of interviews in Washington and London, those who knew Halligen described how he created a trail of creditors, from lawyers to landlords to housekeepers. And they said he left a group of Washington insiders wondering how one charming and audacious hustler managed to seduce them all.
‘I was duped’
Halligen fooled London before he fooled Washington.
“I was duped,” said John Holmes, a retired British army general who was head of the British military’s special forces.
Holmes said he met Halligen in 2002, when Halligen took an IT job at a private security consulting firm where Holmes was working after his military retirement.
Holmes, in an interview in his London office, said he knew Halligen was never a member of any intelligence service. But he worked on the periphery of that world as an engineer for companies that provided technical support — designing batteries, for example — to the British government and military.
Holmes was impressed with Halligen’s smarts and entrepreneurial spirit, he said, so he helped him start his own firm, Red Defence International. Holmes said that over time he realized that Halligen was grossly exaggerating his background to clients and others and that he had an uncanny ability to keep his stories straight.
“He had an intellect that would instinctively allow him to decide what he would say to people and what he wouldn’t say,” Holmes said.
Other friends said Halligen had a habit of hearing spy stories and then repeating them later as tales of his own bravery. One friend said Halligen loved to show off a metal cigarette lighter with an inscription thanking him for helping in a secret rescue of hostages in Colombia.
“A real spy doesn’t do that,” said the friend, who asked not to be named.
Halligen’s taste for luxury was also getting him into trouble. Scarlett Guess, Halligen’s landlord in London, said Halligen rented three floors of her building for close to $20,000 a month, but paid only sporadically.
At the same time, his corporate bank statements, contained in court records in Washington, show that he was spending tens of thousands of dollars at such places as the five-star Stafford London Hotel and Les Ambassadeurs Club, a private casino where membership costs about $40,000 a year.
Before Holmes noticed the increasing warning signs, he said, he backed Halligen’s application to join the Special Forces Club in central London, an exclusive private club for people with links to British intelligence.
That membership helped Halligen immensely as he set his sights on an ultra-lucrative security consultant mecca: Washington.
A high-level network
When Halligen breezed into Washington about 2005, one of his first calls, according to associates, was to Patton Boggs, the heavyweight law firm. He hired the firm to help set up his new U.S. business, Oakley International, which offered risk analysis and security advice to corporate customers.
A key contact at Patton Boggs was lobbyist John C. Garrett, a retired U.S. Marine colonel who serves as the firm’s senior defense policy adviser. Garrett declined to comment for this article, saying Patton Boggs does not discuss former clients.
Halligen used each new contact to methodically build up a high-level network. Garrett introduced Halligen to a number of key Washington establishment figures, including Noel Koch, who was a White House aide under President Richard M. Nixon and whom President Obama appointed deputy undersecretary of defense.
“If John Garrett was vouching for him, that was good enough for me,” Koch said.
Koch recalled getting to know Halligen over boozy lunches at Ristorante La Perla on Pennsylvania Avenue NW.
Shown a photo of Halligen, who, 5-foot-6 and clean-cut, looks like a slightly elfin Boy Scout, La Perla owner Vittorio Testa recalled that he came in nearly every day. Testa said Halligen would sit on the outdoor patio smoking cigarettes and drinking heavily, often arriving at 11 a.m. and not leaving until 4.
“A very elegant man, always good manners,” Testa said.
Koch said he was amazed by Halligen’s lunchtime drinking.
“He’d say, ‘Let’s have martinis,’ and I’d have a martini, as would he,” Koch said. “Then we had another one, then he’d want a bottle of wine. We became fast friends over all those martinis.”
Koch was running a private security consulting company, and at one of their lunches, Halligen said he wanted to subscribe to his firm’s newsletter. Koch said that would cost $15,000, and he said Halligen made an extravagant show of overpaying.
“He wrote me a check for $20,000,” Koch said, “right there at the table.”
In the fall of 2006, Halligen still had money coming in from Red Defence in London, as well as his growing Washington business. But a big break came that September when two executives from a Dutch multinational firm, Trafigura, were arrested in Ivory Coast, accused of illegally dumping toxic waste.
Trafigura hired Halligen to help win release of the executives. Halligen got a large monthly retainer, though it’s unclear exactly what work he did for the money or how much he received. Friends said it ran into the millions of dollars.
A Trafigura spokesman declined to comment. The company eventually paid $198 million to Ivory Coast officials. The executives were released in February 2007, and payments to Halligen stopped.
But up to that point, money was pouring into Halligen’s corporate account, and he was spending it just as fast.
Halligen bought a $1.7 million house with a swimming pool in Great Falls. (The indictment charges that he bought the house the day after Trafigura transferred $2.1 million to him to cover his expenses.)
Halligen was already living in a $6,800-a-month rented house in Georgetown, on N Street near Wisconsin Avenue NW, and yet, at the same time, he was often staying at the Willard.
He was paying a driver about $6,000 a month, usually keeping him and the Lincoln Town Car for 15 hours a day. He dropped hundreds of dollars almost daily at restaurants such as La Perla, Cafe Milano, Martin’s Tavern, Neyla or Shelly’s Back Room, according to his corporate bank statements at the time.
“We used to call him James Bond,” said Robert P. Materazzi, owner of Shelly’s, a downtown D.C. restaurant and cigar bar. Materazzi said that Halligen was “secretive” about his business but that he was a gregarious personality and extravagant tipper who always sat in the same table near the front of the bar, drinking expensive red wine and smoking.
Meda Mladek, Halligen’s landlord on N Street, said Halligen did thousands of dollars worth of damage and unauthorized — and shoddy — construction at her house.
“He pretended to work for the CIA,” Mladek said. “He said he had to have a room that was totally secure, so he had to make new walls, a new ceiling, special doors.”
“He was quite elegant,” she said. “But I had problems, problems, problems.”
The show wedding
Amid it all, Halligen still found time for romance.
Friends said he met Maria Dybczak, a Commerce Department lawyer with big, dark eyes and a brilliant smile, and started courting her lavishly. He bought her a huge diamond ring, a Prada handbag and a pair of purebred Hungarian vizsla puppies, friends said.
Tereza McGuinn, a D.C. makeup artist who was close to Dybczak, said Halligen told Dybczak that he was a British agent. She said that he took Dybczak one weekend for a course on high-performance defensive driving and that he taught her how to handle a gun.
“I thought there was something really wrong about it,” McGuinn said in an interview. McGuinn said that she didn’t believe Halligen’s spy background but that Dybczak seemed blinded by his charm and attention.
In a brief interview at her D.C. home, Dybczak said she and her family had been “devastated” by Halligen but declined to say more.
On the last Friday in April 2007, she wore a white wedding gown at a spectacular evening ceremony at the Evermay estate in Georgetown.
Dybczak’s family, who friends said paid for most of the wedding, came to town from Alabama. Halligen flew over at least a dozen friends from London, first-class, and put them up in suites at the Hay-Adams Hotel. Washington guests included Koch and Garrett, the Patton Boggs lobbyist, who was Halligen’s best man.
Security men with earpieces watched over the high-powered crowd of about 100 people, and guests were met by a sign in calligraphy telling them that no cameras or phones were allowed.
Wedding photographer Clay Blackmore said Dybczak asked him to shoot film only — no digital images.
“She told me, ‘Richard is very connected, and anybody wearing a pin on their lapel can’t be photographed,’ ” Blackmore said. “She told me ‘Richard is top-level and he’s a secret agent’ or something like that. I just bought into it like everybody else did.”
McGuinn said Dybczak and Halligen went “hog-wild” on the wedding, with a huge fireworks display and an extravagant dinner of lobster and lamb in the ballroom, where dinner chairs were covered with thousands of dollars’ worth of silk pillows.
On Evermay’s grand back terrace, Halligen and Dybczak stood on a carpet of rose petals as the minister read vows from a leather-bound notebook and pronounced them husband and wife.
What the guests didn’t know was that the minister was Harry Winter, a professional actor from Arlington’s Signature Theatre, who was hired by the couple to preside over an elaborate fake.
According to friends, Halligen told Dybczak just before the wedding — when guests had been invited and arrangements made — that because he was involved in undercover intelligence operations, he could not sign any public documents — including a marriage license.
It’s unclear whether Dybczak believed him. But rather than cancel the ceremony, she helped him arrange the show wedding. Winter said she paid him $300 in cash.
“It was a wonderful, beautiful service,” Winter said in an interview. “Nobody knew it wasn’t real.”
Nor did they know that Halligen was already married.
British records show that Halligen had been married 16 years earlier to a woman named Jennifer Darvill, and he was still married to her at the time of the Evermay wedding.
“He told me plenty of lies,” said Darvill, reached in England.
Darvill said she met Halligen in 1988, and in all the time she knew him, “I was not aware that he had any involvement with security, military or intelligence.”
She said he left her in 1998 to have an affair with another woman, leaving behind a “stack of unpaid bills” that she paid by selling antiques inherited from her father.
.After the Evermay wedding, Halligen was riding high. He spent the next year building his business. By early 2008, court records show, London lawyer Mark Aspinall — who was his connection on the Trafigura case — had invested $750,000 in Halligen’s Oakley International.
Halligen also received an enormous boost from the internationally known case of Madeleine McCann, a 3-year-old British girl who disappeared while on vacation with her family in Portugal.
In the spring of 2008, the Find Madeleine Fund hired Oakley International on a six-month contract worth just under $1 million. Halligen was supposed to use high-tech surveillance and satellite imagery and conduct interviews to help find the girl.
His bank accounts ballooned with regular deposits of $200,000 or more over the next few months. But Halligen’s carefully constructed life was starting to unravel.
Clarence Mitchell, a spokesman for the Find Madeleine Fund, said fund officials began questioning whether Halligen’s work was worth those large payments, and they terminated his contract in August 2008.
Aspinall, meanwhile, was becoming increasingly suspicious of what became of his $750,000 investment, and court records state that he made at least two trips to Washington to question Halligen.
By September 2008, the McCann contract was canceled, Halligen’s debts were mounting and his reputation was sinking. His relationship with Dybczak was over, and he was preparing his exit from Washington.
His corporate bank records show that in September, October and November 2008, Halligen drained $800,000 from his D.C. account and wired much of that overseas. He sold the Great Falls house. By November, his Washington bank account was overdrawn by $1,400. And Halligen was gone.
His former friends started looking for him and investigating his finances and background. They contacted the FBI. And they also started filing civil suits.
Aspinall filed suit in Washington to recover his investment in Oakley, and a judge ordered Halligen to pay back $871,000.
Halligen was also sued by another Washington insider, Andre Hollis, a former deputy assistant secretary of defense for counternarcotics, who had given a toast at the Evermay wedding.
Hollis, a lawyer who once worked as legal counsel to the House of Representatives and as senior adviser to Afghanistan’s Ministry of Counter Narcotics, sued Halligen in Fairfax Country Circuit Court for $2.35 million.
Hollis alleged that Halligen hired him as chief executive of Oakley International and that Hollis bought an ownership stake in the company. He said that the investment turned out to be worthless and that Halligen drained the company’s accounts. A judge ordered Halligen to pay Hollis more than $5.7 million in damages.
As investigators pursued Halligen, they found yet another surprise. They unearthed documents suggesting that the silver-tongued Brit had actually been born in Ireland.
In November 2009, after a year on the run, Halligen was jailed after being arrested at a luxury hotel in Oxford, England. The bartender there recalled that Halligen had been staying at the hotel for weeks under an alias, with a girlfriend, running up huge bar tabs, buying drinks for the staff and spinning tales of life as a spy.
Staff researcher Jennifer Jenkins and special correspondent Karla Adam in London contributed to this report.
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A player, but what was his game?
A player, but what was his game?
Sullivan, Kevin
The Washington Post
10 June 2012
Some people knew him as Kevin. He told others he was Richard. Everyone could see he had money to burn, and most people thought he was a British spy. But nobody in Washington really knew Kevin Richard Halligen, not even the woman he pretended to marry.
Halligen now sits in a London prison, fighting extradition to the United States, where he faces felony fraud charges stemming from his days of extravagant living in Washington high society.
For about three years, until 2008, Halligen spent hundreds of thousands of dollars living large in Washington. He stayed in a Willard Hotel suite for months at a time and drank the days away at pricey Georgetown restaurants. He traveled everywhere in a chauffeur-driven Lincoln Town Car, set up high-tech offices in Herndon and bought a grand home in Great Falls.
Smart, charming and favoring black turtlenecks and sunglasses, Halligen told everyone that he was a spy, or a former spy, or connected to spies. He told friends that he was under such deep cover that he took over his fiancee's place as a "safe house."
Virtually all of it, it turns out, was fabricated or exaggerated, according to associates who have since investigated his background. But with amazing ease and a perfect British accent, the diminutive Halligen schmoozed his way into Washington's intelligence elite - Pentagon officials, influential lawyers and lobbyists, former CIA operatives.
And he took their money.
He set up shop as a corporate security consultant, offering his dubious "operational experience" in intelligence to solve delicate problems for customers working in dangerous places.
In a capital with a long history of spies, foreigners with shadowy backgrounds, big talkers and charlatans, Halligen didn't set off any alarm bells at first, according to former associates. But that changed when they concluded that Halligen was taking money and not doing the work he promised.
The U.S. government obtained an indictment against him in 2009 on criminal charges of bilking a client out of $2.1 million, and judges in the District and Virginia have ordered him to pay $6.5 million to former partners who claim he fleeced them.
Halligen, through his London lawyer, declined to comment as he fights extradition to the United States in British courts.
But in dozens of interviews in Washington and London, those who knew Halligen described how he created a trail of creditors, from lawyers to landlords to housekeepers. And they said he left a group of Washington insiders wondering how one charming and audacious hustler managed to seduce them all.
'I was duped'
Halligen fooled London before he fooled Washington.
"I was duped," said John Holmes, a retired British army general who was head of the British military's special forces.
Holmes said he met Halligen in 2002, when Halligen took an IT job at a private security consulting firm where Holmes was working after his military retirement.
Holmes, in an interview in his London office, said he knew Halligen was never a member of any intelligence service. But he worked on the periphery of that world as an engineer for companies that provided technical support - designing batteries, for example - to the British government and military.
Holmes was impressed with Halligen's smarts and entrepreneurial spirit, he said, so he helped him start his own firm, Red Defence International. Holmes said that over time he realized that Halligen was grossly exaggerating his background to clients and others and that he had an uncanny ability to keep his stories straight.
"He had an intellect that would instinctively allow him to decide what he would say to people and what he wouldn't say," Holmes said.
Other friends said Halligen had a habit of hearing spy stories and then repeating them later as tales of his own bravery. One friend said Halligen loved to show off a metal cigarette lighter with an inscription thanking him for helping in a secret rescue of hostages in Colombia.
"A real spy doesn't do that," said the friend, who asked not to be named.
Halligen's taste for luxury was also getting him into trouble. Scarlett Guess, Halligen's landlord in London, said Halligen rented three floors of her building for close to $20,000 a month, but paid only sporadically.
At the same time, his corporate bank statements, contained in court records in Washington, show that he was spending tens of thousands of dollars at such places as the five-star Stafford London Hotel and Les Ambassadeurs Club, a private casino where membership costs about $40,000 a year.
Before Holmes noticed the increasing warning signs, he said, he backed Halligen's application to join the Special Forces Club in central London, an exclusive private club for people with links to British intelligence.
That membership helped Halligen immensely as he set his sights on an ultra-lucrative security consultant mecca: Washington.
A high-level network
When Halligen breezed into Washington about 2005, one of his first calls, according to associates, was to Patton Boggs, the heavyweight law firm. He hired the firm to help set up his new U.S. business, Oakley International, which offered risk analysis and security advice to corporate customers.
A key contact at Patton Boggs was lobbyist John C. Garrett, a retired U.S. Marine colonel who serves as the firm's senior defense policy adviser. Garrett declined to comment for this article, saying Patton Boggs does not discuss former clients.
Halligen used each new contact to methodically build up a high-level network. Garrett introduced Halligen to a number of key Washington establishment figures, including Noel Koch, who was a White House aide under President Richard M. Nixon and whom President Obama appointed deputy undersecretary of defense.
"If John Garrett was vouching for him, that was good enough for me," Koch said.
Koch recalled getting to know Halligen over boozy lunches at Ristorante La Perla on Pennsylvania Avenue NW.
Shown a photo of Halligen, who, 5-foot-6 and clean-cut, looks like a slightly elfin Boy Scout, La Perla owner Vittorio Testa recalled that he came in nearly every day. Testa said Halligen would sit on the outdoor patio smoking cigarettes and drinking heavily, often arriving at 11 a.m. and not leaving until 4.
"A very elegant man, always good manners," Testa said.
Koch said he was amazed by Halligen's lunchtime drinking.
"He'd say, 'Let's have martinis,' and I'd have a martini, as would he," Koch said. "Then we had another one, then he'd want a bottle of wine. We became fast friends over all those martinis."
Koch was running a private security consulting company, and at one of their lunches, Halligen said he wanted to subscribe to his firm's newsletter. Koch said that would cost $15,000, and he said Halligen made an extravagant show of overpaying.
"He wrote me a check for $20,000," Koch said, "right there at the table."
In the fall of 2006, Halligen still had money coming in from Red Defence in London, as well as his growing Washington business. But a big break came that September when two executives from a Dutch multinational firm, Trafigura, were arrested in Ivory Coast, accused of illegally dumping toxic waste.
Trafigura hired Halligen to help win release of the executives. Halligen got a large monthly retainer, though it's unclear exactly what work he did for the money or how much he received. Friends said it ran into the millions of dollars.
A Trafigura spokesman declined to comment. The company eventually paid $198 million to Ivory Coast officials. The executives were released in February 2007, and payments to Halligen stopped.
But up to that point, money was pouring into Halligen's corporate account, and he was spending it just as fast.
Halligen bought a $1.7 million house with a swimming pool in Great Falls. (The indictment charges that he bought the house the day after Trafigura transferred $2.1 million to him to cover his expenses.)
Halligen was already living in a $6,800-a-month rented house in Georgetown, on N Street near Wisconsin Avenue NW, and yet, at the same time, he was often staying at the Willard.
He was paying a driver about $6,000 a month, usually keeping him and the Lincoln Town Car for 15 hours a day. He dropped hundreds of dollars almost daily at restaurants such as La Perla, Cafe Milano, Martin's Tavern, Neyla or Shelly's Back Room, according to his corporate bank statements at the time.
"We used to call him James Bond," said Robert P. Materazzi, owner of Shelly's, a downtown D.C. restaurant and cigar bar. Materazzi said that Halligen was "secretive" about his business but that he was a gregarious personality and extravagant tipper who always sat in the same table near the front of the bar, drinking expensive red wine and smoking.
Meda Mladek, Halligen's landlord on N Street, said Halligen did thousands of dollars worth of damage and unauthorized - and shoddy - construction at her house.
"He pretended to work for the CIA," Mladek said. "He said he had to have a room that was totally secure, so he had to make new walls, a new ceiling, special doors."
"He was quite elegant," she said. "But I had problems, problems, problems."
The show wedding
Amid it all, Halligen still found time for romance.
Friends said he met Maria Dybczak, a Commerce Department lawyer with big, dark eyes and a brilliant smile, and started courting her lavishly. He bought her a huge diamond ring, a Prada handbag and a pair of purebred Hungarian vizsla puppies, friends said.
Tereza McGuinn, a D.C. makeup artist who was close to Dybczak, said Halligen told Dybczak that he was a British agent. She said that he took Dybczak one weekend for a course on high-performance defensive driving and that he taught her how to handle a gun.
"I thought there was something really wrong about it," McGuinn said in an interview. McGuinn said that she didn't believe Halligen's spy background but that Dybczak seemed blinded by his charm and attention.
In a brief interview at her D.C. home, Dybczak said she and her family had been "devastated" by Halligen but declined to say more.
On the last Friday in April 2007, she wore a white wedding gown at a spectacular evening ceremony at the Evermay estate in Georgetown.
Dybczak's family, who friends said paid for most of the wedding, came to town from Alabama. Halligen flew over at least a dozen friends from London, first-class, and put them up in suites at the Hay-Adams Hotel. Washington guests included Koch and Garrett, the Patton Boggs lobbyist, who was Halligen's best man.
Security men with earpieces watched over the high-powered crowd of about 100 people, and guests were met by a sign in calligraphy telling them that no cameras or phones were allowed.
Wedding photographer Clay Blackmore said Dybczak asked him to shoot film only - no digital images.
"She told me, 'Richard is very connected, and anybody wearing a pin on their lapel can't be photographed,' " Blackmore said. "She told me 'Richard is top-level and he's a secret agent' or something like that. I just bought into it like everybody else did."
McGuinn said Dybczak and Halligen went "hog-wild" on the wedding, with a huge fireworks display and an extravagant dinner of lobster and lamb in the ballroom, where dinner chairs were covered with thousands of dollars' worth of silk pillows.
On Evermay's grand back terrace, Halligen and Dybczak stood on a carpet of rose petals as the minister read vows from a leather-bound notebook and pronounced them husband and wife.
What the guests didn't know was that the minister was Harry Winter, a professional actor from Arlington's Signature Theatre, who was hired by the couple to preside over an elaborate fake.
According to friends, Halligen told Dybczak just before the wedding - when guests had been invited and arrangements made - that because he was involved in undercover intelligence operations, he could not sign any public documents - including a marriage license.
It's unclear whether Dybczak believed him. But rather than cancel the ceremony, she helped him arrange the show wedding. Winter said she paid him $300 in cash.
"It was a wonderful, beautiful service," Winter said in an interview. "Nobody knew it wasn't real."
Nor did they know that Halligen was already married.
British records show that Halligen had been married 16 years earlier to a woman named Jennifer Darvill, and he was still married to her at the time of the Evermay wedding.
"He told me plenty of lies," said Darvill, reached in England.
Darvill said she met Halligen in 1988, and in all the time she knew him, "I was not aware that he had any involvement with security, military or intelligence."
She said he left her in 1998 to have an affair with another woman, leaving behind a "stack of unpaid bills" that she paid by selling antiques inherited from her father.
Things fall apart
After the Evermay wedding, Halligen was riding high. He spent the next year building his business. By early 2008, court records show, London lawyer Mark Aspinall - who was his connection on the Trafigura case - had invested $750,000 in Halligen's Oakley International.
Halligen also received an enormous boost from the internationally known case of Madeleine McCann, a 3-year-old British girl who disappeared while on vacation with her family in Portugal.
In the spring of 2008, the Find Madeleine Fund hired Oakley International on a six-month contract worth just under $1 million. Halligen was supposed to use high-tech surveillance and satellite imagery and conduct interviews to help find the girl.
His bank accounts ballooned with regular deposits of $200,000 or more over the next few months. But Halligen's carefully constructed life was starting to unravel.
Clarence Mitchell, a spokesman for the Find Madeleine Fund, said fund officials began questioning whether Halligen's work was worth those large payments, and they terminated his contract in August 2008.
Aspinall, meanwhile, was becoming increasingly suspicious of what became of his $750,000 investment, and court records state that he made at least two trips to Washington to question Halligen.
By September 2008, the McCann contract was canceled, Halligen's debts were mounting and his reputation was sinking. His relationship with Dybczak was over, and he was preparing his exit from Washington.
His corporate bank records show that in September, October and November 2008, Halligen drained $800,000 from his D.C. account and wired much of that overseas. He sold the Great Falls house. By November, his Washington bank account was overdrawn by $1,400. And Halligen was gone.
His former friends started looking for him and investigating his finances and background. They contacted the FBI. And they also started filing civil suits.
Aspinall filed suit in Washington to recover his investment in Oakley, and a judge ordered Halligen to pay back $871,000.
Halligen was also sued by another Washington insider, Andre Hollis, a former deputy assistant secretary of defense for counternarcotics, who had given a toast at the Evermay wedding.
Hollis, a lawyer who once worked as legal counsel to the House of Representatives and as senior adviser to Afghanistan's Ministry of Counter Narcotics, sued Halligen in Fairfax Country Circuit Court for $2.35 million.
Hollis alleged that Halligen hired him as chief executive of Oakley International and that Hollis bought an ownership stake in the company. He said that the investment turned out to be worthless and that Halligen drained the company's accounts. A judge ordered Halligen to pay Hollis more than $5.7 million in damages.
As investigators pursued Halligen, they found yet another surprise. They unearthed documents suggesting that the silver-tongued Brit had actually been born in Ireland.
In November 2009, after a year on the run, Halligen was jailed after being arrested at a luxury hotel in Oxford, England. The bartender there recalled that Halligen had been staying at the hotel for weeks under an alias, with a girlfriend, running up huge bar tabs, buying drinks for the staff and spinning tales of life as a spy.
Staff researcher Jennifer Jenkins and special correspondent Karla Adam in London contributed to this report.
Continue Reading...
Sullivan, Kevin
The Washington Post
10 June 2012
Some people knew him as Kevin. He told others he was Richard. Everyone could see he had money to burn, and most people thought he was a British spy. But nobody in Washington really knew Kevin Richard Halligen, not even the woman he pretended to marry.
Halligen now sits in a London prison, fighting extradition to the United States, where he faces felony fraud charges stemming from his days of extravagant living in Washington high society.
For about three years, until 2008, Halligen spent hundreds of thousands of dollars living large in Washington. He stayed in a Willard Hotel suite for months at a time and drank the days away at pricey Georgetown restaurants. He traveled everywhere in a chauffeur-driven Lincoln Town Car, set up high-tech offices in Herndon and bought a grand home in Great Falls.
Smart, charming and favoring black turtlenecks and sunglasses, Halligen told everyone that he was a spy, or a former spy, or connected to spies. He told friends that he was under such deep cover that he took over his fiancee's place as a "safe house."
Virtually all of it, it turns out, was fabricated or exaggerated, according to associates who have since investigated his background. But with amazing ease and a perfect British accent, the diminutive Halligen schmoozed his way into Washington's intelligence elite - Pentagon officials, influential lawyers and lobbyists, former CIA operatives.
And he took their money.
He set up shop as a corporate security consultant, offering his dubious "operational experience" in intelligence to solve delicate problems for customers working in dangerous places.
In a capital with a long history of spies, foreigners with shadowy backgrounds, big talkers and charlatans, Halligen didn't set off any alarm bells at first, according to former associates. But that changed when they concluded that Halligen was taking money and not doing the work he promised.
The U.S. government obtained an indictment against him in 2009 on criminal charges of bilking a client out of $2.1 million, and judges in the District and Virginia have ordered him to pay $6.5 million to former partners who claim he fleeced them.
Halligen, through his London lawyer, declined to comment as he fights extradition to the United States in British courts.
But in dozens of interviews in Washington and London, those who knew Halligen described how he created a trail of creditors, from lawyers to landlords to housekeepers. And they said he left a group of Washington insiders wondering how one charming and audacious hustler managed to seduce them all.
'I was duped'
Halligen fooled London before he fooled Washington.
"I was duped," said John Holmes, a retired British army general who was head of the British military's special forces.
Holmes said he met Halligen in 2002, when Halligen took an IT job at a private security consulting firm where Holmes was working after his military retirement.
Holmes, in an interview in his London office, said he knew Halligen was never a member of any intelligence service. But he worked on the periphery of that world as an engineer for companies that provided technical support - designing batteries, for example - to the British government and military.
Holmes was impressed with Halligen's smarts and entrepreneurial spirit, he said, so he helped him start his own firm, Red Defence International. Holmes said that over time he realized that Halligen was grossly exaggerating his background to clients and others and that he had an uncanny ability to keep his stories straight.
"He had an intellect that would instinctively allow him to decide what he would say to people and what he wouldn't say," Holmes said.
Other friends said Halligen had a habit of hearing spy stories and then repeating them later as tales of his own bravery. One friend said Halligen loved to show off a metal cigarette lighter with an inscription thanking him for helping in a secret rescue of hostages in Colombia.
"A real spy doesn't do that," said the friend, who asked not to be named.
Halligen's taste for luxury was also getting him into trouble. Scarlett Guess, Halligen's landlord in London, said Halligen rented three floors of her building for close to $20,000 a month, but paid only sporadically.
At the same time, his corporate bank statements, contained in court records in Washington, show that he was spending tens of thousands of dollars at such places as the five-star Stafford London Hotel and Les Ambassadeurs Club, a private casino where membership costs about $40,000 a year.
Before Holmes noticed the increasing warning signs, he said, he backed Halligen's application to join the Special Forces Club in central London, an exclusive private club for people with links to British intelligence.
That membership helped Halligen immensely as he set his sights on an ultra-lucrative security consultant mecca: Washington.
A high-level network
When Halligen breezed into Washington about 2005, one of his first calls, according to associates, was to Patton Boggs, the heavyweight law firm. He hired the firm to help set up his new U.S. business, Oakley International, which offered risk analysis and security advice to corporate customers.
A key contact at Patton Boggs was lobbyist John C. Garrett, a retired U.S. Marine colonel who serves as the firm's senior defense policy adviser. Garrett declined to comment for this article, saying Patton Boggs does not discuss former clients.
Halligen used each new contact to methodically build up a high-level network. Garrett introduced Halligen to a number of key Washington establishment figures, including Noel Koch, who was a White House aide under President Richard M. Nixon and whom President Obama appointed deputy undersecretary of defense.
"If John Garrett was vouching for him, that was good enough for me," Koch said.
Koch recalled getting to know Halligen over boozy lunches at Ristorante La Perla on Pennsylvania Avenue NW.
Shown a photo of Halligen, who, 5-foot-6 and clean-cut, looks like a slightly elfin Boy Scout, La Perla owner Vittorio Testa recalled that he came in nearly every day. Testa said Halligen would sit on the outdoor patio smoking cigarettes and drinking heavily, often arriving at 11 a.m. and not leaving until 4.
"A very elegant man, always good manners," Testa said.
Koch said he was amazed by Halligen's lunchtime drinking.
"He'd say, 'Let's have martinis,' and I'd have a martini, as would he," Koch said. "Then we had another one, then he'd want a bottle of wine. We became fast friends over all those martinis."
Koch was running a private security consulting company, and at one of their lunches, Halligen said he wanted to subscribe to his firm's newsletter. Koch said that would cost $15,000, and he said Halligen made an extravagant show of overpaying.
"He wrote me a check for $20,000," Koch said, "right there at the table."
In the fall of 2006, Halligen still had money coming in from Red Defence in London, as well as his growing Washington business. But a big break came that September when two executives from a Dutch multinational firm, Trafigura, were arrested in Ivory Coast, accused of illegally dumping toxic waste.
Trafigura hired Halligen to help win release of the executives. Halligen got a large monthly retainer, though it's unclear exactly what work he did for the money or how much he received. Friends said it ran into the millions of dollars.
A Trafigura spokesman declined to comment. The company eventually paid $198 million to Ivory Coast officials. The executives were released in February 2007, and payments to Halligen stopped.
But up to that point, money was pouring into Halligen's corporate account, and he was spending it just as fast.
Halligen bought a $1.7 million house with a swimming pool in Great Falls. (The indictment charges that he bought the house the day after Trafigura transferred $2.1 million to him to cover his expenses.)
Halligen was already living in a $6,800-a-month rented house in Georgetown, on N Street near Wisconsin Avenue NW, and yet, at the same time, he was often staying at the Willard.
He was paying a driver about $6,000 a month, usually keeping him and the Lincoln Town Car for 15 hours a day. He dropped hundreds of dollars almost daily at restaurants such as La Perla, Cafe Milano, Martin's Tavern, Neyla or Shelly's Back Room, according to his corporate bank statements at the time.
"We used to call him James Bond," said Robert P. Materazzi, owner of Shelly's, a downtown D.C. restaurant and cigar bar. Materazzi said that Halligen was "secretive" about his business but that he was a gregarious personality and extravagant tipper who always sat in the same table near the front of the bar, drinking expensive red wine and smoking.
Meda Mladek, Halligen's landlord on N Street, said Halligen did thousands of dollars worth of damage and unauthorized - and shoddy - construction at her house.
"He pretended to work for the CIA," Mladek said. "He said he had to have a room that was totally secure, so he had to make new walls, a new ceiling, special doors."
"He was quite elegant," she said. "But I had problems, problems, problems."
The show wedding
Amid it all, Halligen still found time for romance.
Friends said he met Maria Dybczak, a Commerce Department lawyer with big, dark eyes and a brilliant smile, and started courting her lavishly. He bought her a huge diamond ring, a Prada handbag and a pair of purebred Hungarian vizsla puppies, friends said.
Tereza McGuinn, a D.C. makeup artist who was close to Dybczak, said Halligen told Dybczak that he was a British agent. She said that he took Dybczak one weekend for a course on high-performance defensive driving and that he taught her how to handle a gun.
"I thought there was something really wrong about it," McGuinn said in an interview. McGuinn said that she didn't believe Halligen's spy background but that Dybczak seemed blinded by his charm and attention.
In a brief interview at her D.C. home, Dybczak said she and her family had been "devastated" by Halligen but declined to say more.
On the last Friday in April 2007, she wore a white wedding gown at a spectacular evening ceremony at the Evermay estate in Georgetown.
Dybczak's family, who friends said paid for most of the wedding, came to town from Alabama. Halligen flew over at least a dozen friends from London, first-class, and put them up in suites at the Hay-Adams Hotel. Washington guests included Koch and Garrett, the Patton Boggs lobbyist, who was Halligen's best man.
Security men with earpieces watched over the high-powered crowd of about 100 people, and guests were met by a sign in calligraphy telling them that no cameras or phones were allowed.
Wedding photographer Clay Blackmore said Dybczak asked him to shoot film only - no digital images.
"She told me, 'Richard is very connected, and anybody wearing a pin on their lapel can't be photographed,' " Blackmore said. "She told me 'Richard is top-level and he's a secret agent' or something like that. I just bought into it like everybody else did."
McGuinn said Dybczak and Halligen went "hog-wild" on the wedding, with a huge fireworks display and an extravagant dinner of lobster and lamb in the ballroom, where dinner chairs were covered with thousands of dollars' worth of silk pillows.
On Evermay's grand back terrace, Halligen and Dybczak stood on a carpet of rose petals as the minister read vows from a leather-bound notebook and pronounced them husband and wife.
What the guests didn't know was that the minister was Harry Winter, a professional actor from Arlington's Signature Theatre, who was hired by the couple to preside over an elaborate fake.
According to friends, Halligen told Dybczak just before the wedding - when guests had been invited and arrangements made - that because he was involved in undercover intelligence operations, he could not sign any public documents - including a marriage license.
It's unclear whether Dybczak believed him. But rather than cancel the ceremony, she helped him arrange the show wedding. Winter said she paid him $300 in cash.
"It was a wonderful, beautiful service," Winter said in an interview. "Nobody knew it wasn't real."
Nor did they know that Halligen was already married.
British records show that Halligen had been married 16 years earlier to a woman named Jennifer Darvill, and he was still married to her at the time of the Evermay wedding.
"He told me plenty of lies," said Darvill, reached in England.
Darvill said she met Halligen in 1988, and in all the time she knew him, "I was not aware that he had any involvement with security, military or intelligence."
She said he left her in 1998 to have an affair with another woman, leaving behind a "stack of unpaid bills" that she paid by selling antiques inherited from her father.
Things fall apart
After the Evermay wedding, Halligen was riding high. He spent the next year building his business. By early 2008, court records show, London lawyer Mark Aspinall - who was his connection on the Trafigura case - had invested $750,000 in Halligen's Oakley International.
Halligen also received an enormous boost from the internationally known case of Madeleine McCann, a 3-year-old British girl who disappeared while on vacation with her family in Portugal.
In the spring of 2008, the Find Madeleine Fund hired Oakley International on a six-month contract worth just under $1 million. Halligen was supposed to use high-tech surveillance and satellite imagery and conduct interviews to help find the girl.
His bank accounts ballooned with regular deposits of $200,000 or more over the next few months. But Halligen's carefully constructed life was starting to unravel.
Clarence Mitchell, a spokesman for the Find Madeleine Fund, said fund officials began questioning whether Halligen's work was worth those large payments, and they terminated his contract in August 2008.
Aspinall, meanwhile, was becoming increasingly suspicious of what became of his $750,000 investment, and court records state that he made at least two trips to Washington to question Halligen.
By September 2008, the McCann contract was canceled, Halligen's debts were mounting and his reputation was sinking. His relationship with Dybczak was over, and he was preparing his exit from Washington.
His corporate bank records show that in September, October and November 2008, Halligen drained $800,000 from his D.C. account and wired much of that overseas. He sold the Great Falls house. By November, his Washington bank account was overdrawn by $1,400. And Halligen was gone.
His former friends started looking for him and investigating his finances and background. They contacted the FBI. And they also started filing civil suits.
Aspinall filed suit in Washington to recover his investment in Oakley, and a judge ordered Halligen to pay back $871,000.
Halligen was also sued by another Washington insider, Andre Hollis, a former deputy assistant secretary of defense for counternarcotics, who had given a toast at the Evermay wedding.
Hollis, a lawyer who once worked as legal counsel to the House of Representatives and as senior adviser to Afghanistan's Ministry of Counter Narcotics, sued Halligen in Fairfax Country Circuit Court for $2.35 million.
Hollis alleged that Halligen hired him as chief executive of Oakley International and that Hollis bought an ownership stake in the company. He said that the investment turned out to be worthless and that Halligen drained the company's accounts. A judge ordered Halligen to pay Hollis more than $5.7 million in damages.
As investigators pursued Halligen, they found yet another surprise. They unearthed documents suggesting that the silver-tongued Brit had actually been born in Ireland.
In November 2009, after a year on the run, Halligen was jailed after being arrested at a luxury hotel in Oxford, England. The bartender there recalled that Halligen had been staying at the hotel for weeks under an alias, with a girlfriend, running up huge bar tabs, buying drinks for the staff and spinning tales of life as a spy.
Staff researcher Jennifer Jenkins and special correspondent Karla Adam in London contributed to this report.
Labels:
2012,
Andre Hollis,
FBI,
Find Madeleine Fund,
John Holmes,
Kevin Halligen,
Madeleine McCann,
Mark Aspinall,
Oakley Intl,
Patton Boggs,
Special Forces Club,
Trafigura
JUDGMENT: Kevin Halligen Appeal
Kevin Halligen
Former McCann Private Investigator
JUDGMENT (PDF file)
Lukaszewski (Appellant) v The District Court in Torun, Poland (Respondent)
Pomiechowski (Appellant) v District Court of Legunica 59-220 Poland (Respondent)
Rozanski (Appellant) v Regional Court 3 Penal Department Poland (Respondent)
R (on the application of Halligen) (Appellant) v Secretary of State for the Home Department (Respondent)
Easter Term
[2012] UKSC 20
On appeal from: [2011] EWHC 2060 Admin;
[2011] EWHC 1584 Admin
before
Lord Phillips, President
Lady Hale
Lord Mance
Lord Kerr
Lord Wilson
JUDGMENT GIVEN ON 23 May 2012
Continue Reading...
Former McCann Private Investigator
JUDGMENT (PDF file)
Lukaszewski (Appellant) v The District Court in Torun, Poland (Respondent)
Pomiechowski (Appellant) v District Court of Legunica 59-220 Poland (Respondent)
Rozanski (Appellant) v Regional Court 3 Penal Department Poland (Respondent)
R (on the application of Halligen) (Appellant) v Secretary of State for the Home Department (Respondent)
Easter Term
[2012] UKSC 20
On appeal from: [2011] EWHC 2060 Admin;
[2011] EWHC 1584 Admin
before
Lord Phillips, President
Lady Hale
Lord Mance
Lord Kerr
Lord Wilson
JUDGMENT GIVEN ON 23 May 2012
Labels:
2012,
Kevin Halligen,
Madeleine McCann,
Trafigura
Kevin Halligen Extradition Appeal: FBI charges money laundering and wire fraud
On appeal from the QBD Divisional Court (England and Wales)
Issues
- What are the minimum requirements to constitute good notice of appeal for the purposes of section 108(4) of the Extradition Act 2003?
- If an individual is notified by fax sent after 4:30p.m. that the Secretary of State has decided to order his extradition, when does time begin to run for the purposes of the 14-day time limit in section 108(4) of the Extradition Act 2003?
- The Appellant was arrested under a provisional arrest warrant issued under section 73 of the Extradition Act 2003.
- He was remanded in custody while the Secretary of State considered whether to order his extradition to the USA.
- On 22 December 2010 officials acting on behalf of the Secretary of State sent a fax to the Appellant informing him that the Secretary of State had decided to order his extradition. It is not clear whether the fax was sent before or after 4:30pm on that day.
- Seven days later, on 29 December 2010, the Appellant’s solicitors filed a full notice of appeal in form N161 with the Administrative Court.
- On the same day, the Appellant also sent a handwritten letter to the Secretary of State asking her to ‘accept this letter as notice and service of my intent to appeal that order’ and stating that he had instructed solicitors and counsel for that purpose.
- On 4 January 2011 the 14-day time limit for filing and serving a notice of appeal prima facie expired.
- On 5 January 2011 the Appellant’s solicitors faxed a sealed copy of the Appellant’s form N161 to the Crown Prosecution Service and posted a sealed copy of the form to the Secretary of State.
- On trial of a preliminary issue, the Divisional Court held that it did not have jurisdiction to entertain an appeal against the Secretary of State’s decision to order the Appellant’s extradition since the Appellant had failed to comply with the requirements of section 108(4) of the Extradition Act 2003.
- The court held that the Appellant’s handwritten letter was not a notice of appeal because it was no more than an indication that the Appellant intended to appeal.
- The court also held that the 14-day time limit began to run on the day that the Appellant was informed that the Secretary of State had ordered his extradition, regardless of what time during the day the fax notifying him of the decision was actually sent.
- Accordingly, the time-limit for filing and serving a valid notice of appeal had expired on 4 January 2011 – before the Appellant served his form N161 on the Secretary of State and the CPS.
***********************************
General - CaseID: UKSC 2011/0180
- Case name: R (on the application of Halligen) (Appellant) v Secretary of State for the Home Department (Respondent)
- Case stage: Hearing Scheduled
- Date of issue: 10 Aug 2011
- Expedition requested: Not Applied For
- Order being appealed - Date: 21 Jun 2011
- Order being appealed - Court: Divisional Court QBD (EW)
- Devolution: No
- Human Rights raised: Yes
- Human Rights raised - details: Article 6 ECHR Declaration of Incompatibility sought
- Intervener: No
***********************************
Permission to appeal
- Date supporting documents received: 16 Aug 2011
- Date PTA application referred to justices: 04 Oct 2011
- Permission granted/refused: Granted
- Notice of intention to proceed filed: Yes
***********************************
Parties
- Appellant name: Kevin Richard Halligen
- Respondent name: Secretary of State for the Home Department
- Date form 3 filed: 18 Nov 2011
- Respondent case date filed: 31 Jan 2012
***********************************
Appeal
- Justices allocated: Yes
- Justices allocated - names:
- Lord Phillips of Worth Matravers
- Lady Hale of Richmond
- Lord Mance of Frognal
- Lord Kerr of Wilson
- PTA granted by court below: No
- Statement of facts & issues and Appendix due date: 07 Feb 2012
- Time estimate number of days: 1.5 days
- Hearing date: 21 Feb 2012
***********************************
Labels:
2012,
FBI,
Fraud,
Kevin Halligen,
Money Laundering
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