DOS SANTOS: POLICE WORKER SOLD SECRETS THROUGH MAX CLIFFORD
A cash-strapped police worker joked that he felt like James Bond as he sent secrets about Royal bodyguards to PR guru Max Clifford, a court heard.
Jairo Dos Santos, 29, emailed details of more than 2,700 expenses claims made by members of the Met’s Protection Command to a reporter at the Mail on Sunday, it is alleged.
The unit guards the Queen and other senior Royals, as well as providing protection for the Prime Minister and other potential terrorist targets.
Dos Santos hired Clifford in a bid to spark a bidding war between the Mail and the News of The World in July 2010, Southwark Crown Court was told.
As he allegedly doled out the secrets, he is said to have emailed his partner and quipped: ‘Looking over my shoulder. I feel like 007.’
He is accused of selling the details after he sacked from Protection Command’s finance department and found himself £1,000 overdrawn.
The agency worker showed ‘disregard for the effectiveness of such police operations’ and the sale was the product of ‘opportunism and financial greed’, said prosecutor Gareth Patterson.
‘He had been vetted and allowed access as part of his work to confidential information,’ he added.
‘That confidential information concerned ongoing police operations including the Royal Family, the Prime Minister and others.
‘It was in those circumstances that he sold confidential police information to a newspaper.
‘He deliberately sought to increase the price that he could get for this police information, he encouraged a bidding war by playing off the News of the World against the Mail on Sunday.
‘He also employed the services of Max Clifford Associates, the well-known press relations consultants, in order to help him get a higher price for his sale of police information.
‘He eventually managed to get £32,000.
‘In selling the confidential police information he did not seek the consent of the individual police officers who had been conducting the various operations and whose names and whose personal details he sold to the Press.
‘Nor did he seek the consent of the senior police officers who planned or ran these operations.’
The information Dos Santos sold was used by the Mail on Sunday to write two articles published on successive weekends in July 2010, the court heard.
As a result, the police had to assess their ongoing security arrangements and put additional security measures in place.
Mr Patterson said: ‘By his actions the defendant caused the release into the public domain of information about how the police managed protection operations in relation to principals, the people being protected, such as members of the Royal Family and former Prime Ministers – information which the police, for obvious reasons, try to keep confidential.
‘As a result of these articles the police had to conduct a number of assessments in relation to the arrangements made for protecting those principals.
‘This resulted in the need for additional security measures and it impacted upon operational deployment and police procedures.
‘The prosecution say that it is significant that the defendant sold this information at a time when he had been given his notice by the police.’
‘His actions disregard for the effectiveness of such police operations and they were born out of opportunism in their timing and quite simply, financial greed.
‘What he did was a serious breach of the trust that was placed in him by the Police, who at the time were paying for his services.’
Under his terms of employment in Protection Command’s finance department he had been granted counter terrorism clearance and made to sign a code of conduct, jurors were told.
Mr Patterson said: ‘The particular sensitivity of the information that he would be handling while working in Specialist Operations was emphasised to him by the fact that the terms of the Official Secrets Acts were drawn to his attention.
‘By signing this document in 2008 he was confirming that he understood the importance, was he not, when working for the police of holding certain information in strict confidence and recognised that if he made unauthorised disclosure of such information he could in fact be committing offences as serious as offences under the Official Secrets Acts.’
The court heard that Dos Santos emailed 14 spread sheets containing details of more than 2,700 expenses claims to Jason Lewis at the Mail on Sunday on July 1, 2010, having emailed it to his own personal email account the day before.
Mr Patterson said that he had been given two weeks’ notice by the police a fortnight earlier and had been due to finish work on July 2.
He said that as of June 24 Dos Santos’ bank account was £1,050 overdrawn.
‘It is worth considering a little more closely what the defendant was doing during his final few days at work,’ said the barrister.
‘Because, what is apparent from emails and text messages which he sent in those final days is that he spent a great deal of time and effort communicating with two newspapers and Max Clifford Associates trying to sell Metropolitan Police information for as much money as possible.’
In another sent to Max Clifford Associates he wrote he wanted to get in touch with the News of the World ‘as they usually pay more and of course we would go with the highest offer on the table’.
Dos Santos, of (Flat 7, Cherry Wood Lodge) Oakwood Close, Hither Green, southeast London, denies one count of disclosing personal data.
The trial continues.
