Top lawyer and investigator suspended at Customs

Gavin McFarlane of Temple Chambers Cardiff

Customs and Excise and bad news seem to go hand in hand these days. A period of relative calm over the summer, during which to digest the Budget announcement that it would merge with the Inland Revenue, was shattered by a Treasury press release on 29 September. Terry Byrne, Director General, Law Enforcement and David Pickup, Solicitor, the department’s most senior lawyer, had been suspended with immediate effect. The background to the latest moves is Operation Gestalt, a Metropolitan Police investigation into the mid-1990s London City Bond affair. It concentrates on a series of excise diversion frauds centred on a bonded warehouse that were probed by the Customs and Excise National Investigation Service. The undercover operation went badly wrong and the convictions obtained in subsequent prosecutions were quashed by the Court of Appeal. This led to an enquiry by Sir Neil Butterfield, a High Court judge.