A former head of theCrown Prosecution Service’s specialcrimeunit has questioned the body’s explanation for the collapse of a case involving alleged Chinese spies.
Christopher Berry and ex-parliamentary researcher Christopher Cash were both accused of providing ‘information prejudicial to the interests of the state’ between December 2021 and February 2023.
Both men denied the charges – but last month, the CPS announced they had been unexpectedly dropped.
This prompted anger among many top politicians, including speaker Sir Lindsay Hoyle who suggested he could launch a private action against Mr Berry and Mr Cash.
Director of public prosecutions (DPP) Stephen Parkinson has now said the CPS tried ‘over many months’ to get the evidence it needed to prosecute the case but thegovernmentdid not provide it.
He told MPs in a letter yesterday that none of the statements sent over statedChinawas a threat to national security at the time of the alleged offence – a crucial detail needed to press ahead.
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Prime Minister SirKeir Starmerhas said it was the previous government’s views on China that matter, since it was in charge when the incidents were thought to have taken place.
Speaking today, the PM said ‘all the focus’ on the reasons for the collapse ‘needs to be on the policy of the Tory government’.
Nick Vamos, a former head of special crime at CPS who now investigates business crime at Peters & Peters, said the DPP’s explanation ‘still doesn’t add up’.
He toldMetro: ‘The Court of Appeal decision in theBulgarian spy caseexpanded rather than restricted the definition of ‘enemy’.
‘The Court explicitly stated that “we do not think that this term raises a question of any particular complexity” and that “enemy means the same thing now as it did (since the Act came into force)” which includes countries that represent a current threat to national security.
‘The judgment did not set any new evidential bars.
‘Therefore, either the CPS did not have sufficient evidence to charge the defendants in the first place, or they misunderstood what they needed to prove.
‘The fact that the government then refused to provide evidence that China was a threat to national security at the time the offences is committed is hard to fathom, but does not explain why the CPS did not ask for that evidence before the defendants were charged.’
Tory MP Alicia Kearns, who Mr Cash once worked for, said the PM needed to ‘come clean’ over the collapse of the case.
She said: ‘For weeks, Labour have stonewalled the British people.
‘Now the CPS has taken the extraordinary step of revealing our own Government refused to co-operate with them, confirming serious questions about constitutional impropriety.
‘The government must come clean – who is responsible for spiking the prosecution?’
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