Tomorrow marks the first anniversary of the collapse of the Tulisa Contostavlos trial. A judge ruled on 21 July 2014 that the drugs case against the singer should not proceed because the Sun’s investigative reporter, Mazher Mahmood, had seemingly lied on oath.
Judge Alistair McCreath said he believed the journalist known as the “fake sheikh” had lied in the witness stand about the sting operation on Contostavlos in which she was to encouraged to arrange a cocaine deal.
There were, said the judge, “strong grounds for believing that the underlying purpose of these lies was to conceal the fact that he had been manipulating the evidence in this case” by getting another witness to change his account.
Mahmood was immediately suspended on full pay by the Sun on Sunday’s publisher, News UK, which announced a “full internal investigation” into the matter.
On 4 August 2014, the Metropolitan police formally announced that officers from its specialist crime and operations squad were investigating whether the judgment and “other material supplied by the prosecution counsel... amount to the commission of any criminal offences.”
In the following weeks, the Crown Prosecution Service (CPS) dropped three cases in which Mahmood was due to have been the key witness on the understanding that his evidence could no longer be relied on to guarantee a conviction.
The CPS also contacted 25 defendants in previous cases who were charged following articles written by Mahmood during his years as investigations editor of the News of the World prior to its closure in 2011.
No news leaked of the Met police investigation between August and June 2015 when the CPS confirmed that it had received the final police report on Mahmood “relating to allegations of perjury and conspiracy to pervert the course of justice”.
At the time, a CPS spokeswomen said the file was being “reviewed in accordance with the code for crown prosecutors”. My inquiries to the CPS in subsequent weeks yielded only the fact that the service was still making up its mind whether there was enough reliable and credible evidence to warrant charging him and whether there was a “realistic prospect of conviction”.
The CPS, which has anything but a good track record in its recent prosecution of journalists, must also take account of whether there is a public interest in bringing a case to court.
Following my latest inquiry, a CPS spokeswoman promised to get back to me. Update: At 3.56pm, the CPS press office emailed a similar statement to the one issued six weeks ago:
“Following a 10-month police investigation, the CPS received a full file from the MPS on Friday 5 June relating to allegations of perjury and conspiracy to pervert the course of justice.
“This is a complex area of law and it is vital that the file is carefully considered. A decision will be made as soon as is practicable.”
Comment: Even though I am assured that the CPS is giving this matter its full attention, and that the Metropolitan police carried out a thorough investigation, it is difficult to see why we are still awaiting a decision some 12 months on.
Let’s hope a decision is made soon. I am sure that the delay is also the reason that we have heard no more about News UK’s internal investigation.
The publisher was hardly likely to announce the result of its own inquiry ahead of the legal authorities’ own conclusions.
So we - and Mahmood himself, of course - must steel ourselves for an official announcement that, whichever way it goes, will surely have far-reaching implications.
