Walter Finch
THE so-called McGrail inquiry reconvened yesterday to examine allegations of ‘a number of possible deletions’ of Whatsapp messages between senior Royal Gibraltar Police officers.
Seeing the familiar faces back in Gibraltar’s stately Garrison Library has been likened to ‘getting the band back together’ and a ‘mere exercise in transparency that won’t affect the chairman’s ultimate findings.’
But the inquiry has reconvened to investigate the absence of messages on both the work and personal phones of then-Superintendent Paul Richards and Commissioner of Police Ian McGrail between the 30 April and 22 May, 2020.
The three week period covers the critical events that triggered McGrail’s early retirement and ultimately the inquiry itself.
Among the missing messages is the fateful one supposedly informing McGrail that Richardson had arrived at Hassans offices on the morning of May 12, 2020, with a search warrant for senior partner James Levy.
After the main hearings finished last June, the RGP made submissions of evidence in September, again in November, and even as late as 20 December, prompting lawyers representing the government to call for the inquiry to reconvene.
In a session that heavily focused on data protection and information management of the Royal Gibraltar Police, current Assistant Commissioner Cathal Yeats and outgoing Commissioner Richard Ullger fielded the questions.
Both men continually downplayed the importance of the Whatsapp messages in police procedures to explain why they had not been submitted in time – despite their clear importance to the inquiry when documenting interactions between senior government figures and Hassans lawyers.
Yeats admitted under questioning that the specific Whatsapp between Richardson and McGrail on May 12 had been lost.
It was heard that data had been wiped from police mobile phones when Richardson and McGrail retired and handed in their devices ‘as standard’.
Another factor Yeats spoke of was the ‘transition from Samsung to iPhone devices in Nov 2020, which resulted in all Whatsapp data on the phones belonging to Commissioner Ullger and Richardson being lost.’
Both officers were keen to impress that almost all communications of significance would be done via emails stored on a server, reports or face-to-face briefings.
“This inquiry has taken Whatsapps to another level as if, [they] are the be all and end all of policing, when it isn’t the case,” Ullger said.
The hearing continues.
This article was amended to correct the claim that lawyers representing the government and Hassans called for the inquiry reconvene. The lawyers were only representing the government.
