MEDIA STUDIES
Why I believe Ms Brittain was more than a mere postbox
STEPHEN GLOVER
Last Friday the Guardian appointed an ombudsman, John Willis, who will look into the Victoria Brittain affair. Mr Willis, until recently director of programmes for Channel 4, is an investigative reporter by trade. He should be well suited to cut his way through the complexities of this case.
Some may say Mr Willis can't be depend- ed on to come up with an independent judgment. His salary, after all, is paid by the Guardian. Its editor, Alan Rusbridger, appointed him and can presumably dismiss him. Having him on the inquiry is a bit like asking the chief constable of one police force to look into allegations of brutality in a neighbouring one. In such a case the Guardian would tut-tut about the police washing their own dirty linen.
However, we should at this stage give Mr Willis the benefit of the doubt. A Guardian nabob was quoted to me the other day as saying that whatever Ms Brittain may or may not have done, the newspaper's repu- tation must be protected at all costs. I hope Mr Willis's sense of professional pride will be provoked by such expectations. It may be that this column will be of some use to him as he sets about his task.
Last week Ms Brittain wrote to this mag- azine in response to my article about her the previous week. It is a long, swirling let- ter, full of insults against me which I shall not bother to answer for fear of wearying the reader. She goes down several interest- ing, but not strictly relevant paths, and skates around some inconvenient facts. None of this matters very much. What is much more significant is her reluctance (or inability) in a letter of over 800 words to address, in any detail, the central charges against her.
I should summarise the facts as they seem to have been accepted by all parties. Over a period of some 16 months (October 1993 to February 1995) some £250,000 was paid into Ms Brittain's Abbey National bank accounts on behalf of her close per- sonal friend Kojo Tsikata. We know this as a result of the revelations to the Mail on Sunday of a disgruntled MIS operative called David Shayler. We also know that most of the money paid into her accounts came from Libyan sources. Its provenance alerted MI5, who believed Ms Brittain to be sympathetic to the Libyan regime and knew that Mr Tsikata, a very senior Ghana- ian politician, is one of its closest friends.
In fact these funds were destined to pay for a libel action which Mr Tsikata had mounted against the Independent. Ms Brit- tain has told her editor, Mr Rusbridger, that she had no idea that most of the money was Libyan, and has produced her bank statements which are said to make no reference to Libyan sources. According to her version, as relayed to me by Mr Rus- bridger, she was in effect acting as a post- box. She claims to have played no active role in Mr Tsikata's libel action against a rival newspaper.
In my previous two articles I found Ms Brittain's account of herself incredible. These are the main charges against her, which her letter failed to address, and which Mr Willis should consider: (1) Ms Brittain says she did not know that the money paid into her accounts on Mr Tsikata's behalf came from Libyan sources. But she must have realised that her friend could not have earned these huge amounts of money in his official capacity. His annual salary as head of gov- ernment security in Ghana was some £4,000. A Guardian spokesman told the Daily Telegraph that 'she had no idea how much he earned'. But she would have had a very good idea, partly because she was Mr Tsikata's very close friend, and partly because she is an expert on the Ghanaian regime.
(2) Ms Brittain has told Mr Rusbridger that she acted as a conduit for Mr Tsikata's funds out of friendship, having previously done the same service when Mr Tsikata's son was being educated in Britain. This is not convincing. Why could the money not be routed through the legal channels of the Ghanaian High Commission in London, or be sent directly to his solicitors, Bindman and Partners?
(3) Ms Brittain's statements may not show the sources of the transfers. However, this doesn't prove she didn't know. Didn't her close friend Mr Tsikata, who obviously knew, having arranged the transfers him- self, tell her? Abbey National says that when money is transferred in foreign cur- rency from an account abroad, a letter is separately sent to the recipient, though there is no indication on the bank state- ment. A transfer to Ms Brittain of £49,989 on 11 November 1994 from Kojo Amoo- Gottfried, the Ghanaian ambassador in Peking, originated in a Swiss bank account and was probably paid in a non-sterling currency. If it was, Ms Brittain should have received a letter notifying her of the trans- fer.
(4) In any case, the bizarre origins of this particular transfer (the only sizeable non- Libyan one) would have been made clear to her when she met her friend Mr Amoo- Gottfried in Peking in September 1995 — a meeting which, in her letter, she accepts took place. Is it conceivable that this meet- ing could have passed without Mr Amoo- Gottfried remarking that he had trans- ferred nearly £50,000 into her account ten months previously?
(5) Ms Brittain has told Mr Rusbridger she took no active part in Mr Tsikata's libel action against the Independent, in which that paper's defence concerned the free- dom of the press. But it seems that she and Geoffrey Bindman, senior partner at Bind- man's, discussed it on several occasions, and that Ms Brittain was therefore actively involved in a case against a rival newspa- per. Her characterisation of herself as a mere postbox is wrong. She managed the funds coming into her account, making numerous transfers between her own accounts before passing the money on to Bindman's.
(6) Ms Brittain's friendship with, and championing of, Mr Tsikata was inappro- priate in a journalist. He may have been exonerated for the murder of three judges in 1982 but he had been head of Ghanaian security, and was effectively number two in the government, at a time when the regime was criticised by Amnesty International for human rights abuses. Even if there were not many other serious questions about her conduct, this association alone would be sufficient to condemn her in many people's judgment.
This is a complex case, but at its heart is the simple question of a journalist's con- duct on a newspaper that has led the cam- paign against corruption among Tory politi- cians. I have never met Ms Brittain. I don't think that she was motivated by naked self- interest. But her involvement with Mr Tsikata has taken her far beyond what is proper in a journalist. It has made her a player in Ghanaian politics, not an observ- er, and virtually a participant in a libel case against a rival newspaper. Now she finds herself in the tangled web of concealment.
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