Walter Finch
GIBRALTAR’S sprawling public inquiry into the early retirement of a former police chief returned last week looking to flip the narrative on its head.
The three days prompted the inquiry chair, Sir Peter Openshaw, to admit he would have to make some ‘consequential amendments’ to previous chapters in his final report, which was already at an ‘advanced stage of preparation’.
After the original hearings last year had shown various government and Hassans figures in a critical light, it was the turn of ex-Commissioner of Police Ian McGrail and his Royal Gibraltar Police colleagues to be dragged over the coals.
In the spotlight were their lax disclosure of Whatsapp messages, which saw some submitted as late as last December, nearly eight months after the initial hearings had finished, while a number of communications have not resurfaced at all.
READ MORE: ‘Where’s the missing police Whatsapps?’ Gibraltar’s McGrail inquiry comes back with a bang
McGrail was forced to apologise for not handing over his chat logs with his former assistant and successor Richard Ullger and former Superintendent Paul Richardson when requested as they ‘did not feature in my mind as relevant at the time.’
“Rest assured there was nothing sinister whatsoever in me not providing those,” McGrail told the inquiry.
“I have been kicking myself with disappointment and even a level of embarrassment.”
The admission was part of a three-day reconvening of the inquiry which also saw Ullger and Richardson explain why they did not disclose their own Whatsapps.
In question are missing messages between McGrail and Richardson covering the crucial dates in the saga between April 30 and May 22, 2020.
The absent Whatsapps include from the fateful May 12 day when the RGP went to the offices of Hassans law firm – the largest and most powerful in Gibraltar – to execute a search warrant on its senior partner James Levy during Operation Delhi.
McGrail said the ‘simplest and most likely explanation’ is that the message was exchanged between their work phones, which were subsequently wiped when he retired.
Richardson echoed this line, adding: “It would have probably made a conscious decision to send it on my work device then because it was specifically related to an active live police investigation which was being executed.”
Meanwhile, Ullger claimed to have lost some, but not all, of his WhatsApp chats on his personal phone when he purchased a new one in June 2020 and transferred his data.
When asked why some messages were saved and others were lost during this transfer process, he said he had ‘absolutely no idea’.
The missing included all messages in the the ‘Senior Management Team’ Whatsapp group with McGrail and Richardson, communications with McGrail’s personal phone – and with Ullger’s sister.
When cross-examining McGrail, Sir Peter Caruana, acting for the government, dismissed these excuses as ‘not credible for a number of reasons’.
Most notably, he pointed out that McGrail was ‘a highly experienced police officer and trained and highly experienced in detection, identification, preservation and safe custody of relevant evidence.’
“That is simply, in the government parties’ view, not a good enough justification for such an obvious and serious failure which has continued over more than two years and it is simply too convenient, too implausible and too self-serving an excuse,” he said.
Caruana noted that while McGrail had disclosed WhatsApps between himself and many other people, he did not ‘disclose the WhatsApps with colleagues, with RGP officers, except a few that were helpful to him in relation to the airport incident which he says he accidentally found at home on a pen drive in an old glasses case whilst he was tidying up his desk at home in 2022.’
There was even an element of ‘getting even’ in the line of questioning after Caruana excoriated McGrail for ‘attacking the Chief Minister, the Attorney General and other witnesses for not disclosing closing WhatsApps when you knew all along that you yourself had not done so.’
Ben Cooper KC, representing ‘the Defendants’ in the police Operation Delhi (Thomas Cornelio, John Perez and Caine Sanchez) – which resulted in McGrail’s early retirement and triggered the inquiry – pointed out that McGrail had been arrested in March 2023 for ‘data breaches and related offences.’
“We know categorically that upon Mr McGrail’s retirement in June 2020, he took with him, without authorisation, police property relevant to a live Operation Delhi investigation,” he said.
“A hard drive packed with RGP data that remains unaccounted for; RGP documentary materials, which he later destroyed; his own daybooks relevant to the live investigation, which were not made available to the Supreme Court, responsible for the liberty of the defendants, nor to this Inquiry.
“We know now that Mr McGrail was equally cavalier with other contemporaneous records of the police investigation.
“His own telephone messaging evidence has been lost as well. We can add that to the long list.”
Richardson’s lawyer, Patrick Gibbs KC, called all these lines of attack ‘smoke without fire.’
He told the chair, Sir Peter Openshaw: “Why would [McGrail] and others withhold messages which you yourself, sir, have said are unlikely to change your core findings?
“Either they are so important they have to risk perjury for withholding them, or they are not particularly important and they were held back accidentally.”
Instead, he criticised the government’s lawyers for being a ‘stalking horse for Hassans’ given that Sir Peter ‘appeared to have been defending the honour and reputations of [Hassans partners] Mr Levy and Mr Baglietto.’
“At this hearing, and indeed during this Inquiry, we have looked from Hassans to government and from government to Hassans, but it was impossible to say which was which.”
Openshaw finished the inquiry’s final session by saying he would deliver the report ‘as soon as I can’.
He also reminded the government it has ‘a statutory duty to publish’ it once delivered.
But first it must undergo a ‘Maxwellisation’ process, in which any criticised parties are given a chance to respond before publication.
