Why Customs and Excise may not continue to prosecute fraud

Gavin McFarlane of Titmuss Sainer Dechert and London Guildhall University reviews the decline in credibility of UK Customs and Excise as an investigating and prosecuting authority and suggests that the days of its dual function may be numbered.

This column has already reported in detail on the catastrophe which overtook Customs and Excise when the third trial of Brian Doran, Kenneth Togher and others collapsed at Bristol Crown court last year. Among the discreditable features of the investigation and the prosecution case were defects in identification evidence which led to the withdrawal of the original prosecuting counsel from the case and, worst of all, the failure by Customs investigating officers to obtain the correct authorisation to bug a hotel bedroom used by suspects. Following that debacle, and because of other serious irregularities in Customs’ prosecutions during recent months, notably the Simon de Danser case, a review of the procedures which Customs and Excise had employed in the Bristol case was set up under Gerald Butler QC. Happily for Customs, Butler has not been quite as critical of the department as Mr Justice Turner, the High Court judge who threw out the third effort to convict Togher and Doran at Bristol. Butler, himself a retired circuit judge, did not find the transgressions by the investigating officers to have been deliberate. However, he lays the blame firmly at the door of Customs investigators and lawyers for their failure to let the defence know that bugging operations had taken place.