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Cash-for-honours probe nearing climax

Will Woodward

Prosecutors in London said on Saturday that they had all the evidence they need to decide whether to charge anyone in connection with the cash-for-honours inquiry.

The Crown Prosecution Service (CPS) told Scotland Yard to make further inquiries when police first handed in the file in April. But a spokeswoman for the CPS said on Saturday: “We have all the evidence we need to make a decision. The review of t he evidence is ongoing.”

The statement suggests the 15-month inquiry, which has seen 136 people interviewed and cost more than £800,000, may be close to climax. It emerged last week, after he left office, that Tony Blair had been interviewed for the third time by detectives shortly before he stood down as Prime Minister. He was treated as a witness each time.

Three persons — Lord Levy, Mr. Blair’s fundraiser; Ruth Turner, the former director of government relations at Downing Street, and Sir Christopher Evans, the biotech tycoon — have been arrested in the investigation. All three deny any wrongdoing. The inquiry began in March last year when Angus McNeil, the Scottish Nationalist MP, and two others made a complaint under the Honours (Prevention of Abuses) Act of 1925, after it emerged that the Labour party had accepted loans from supporters who were later nominated for peerages by Mr. Blair.

Prime Minister Gordon Brown has said that the Attorney General, Lady Scotland, will no longer have the power to direct prosecutors in individual cases.

But Ministers are nervous that any prosecution will damage the government politically and make it more difficult to draw a line under the Blair era. —

Guardian Newspapers Limited 2007

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