MURDOCH: Leveson: Matt Sprake ex -met - part of his agency’...

MURDOCH: Leveson: Matt Sprake ex -met - part of his agency’...: 

 Police and other public officials are still being offered thousands of pounds for information about the private lives of celebrities, The Independent can reveal.

An investigation by Exaro, the investigative website, www.exaronews.com, found that officials such as probation and prison officers are being targeted by a former Metropolitan Police forensics and surveillance officer now running a news agency selling pictures and stories to newspapers.

This is despite the current police investigation into the alleged bribing of public officials by journalists, and the Leveson inquiry into media ethics.

Today a prison officer and two other people were arrested in connection with the police probe into corrupt payments to officials by journalists.

So far a total of 37 people have been arrested in connection with Operation Elveden, the investigation into suspected corrupt payments to public officials.

But despite this Newspics, a press agency based in Shenfield, Essex, still appears to be offering four-figure sums for ‘scoops’ through its website.

The agency claims endorsements from the picture desk of The People, the red-top Sunday tabloid, OK magazine, the celebrity title, and the Press Association, the national news agency. The Independent has published legitimate photographs taken by Newspics photographers.

On a page of its website headed ‘news exclusives' it says:

“Do you know of a story, a scandal, something that made you interested, chances are that a newspaper will pay for that information.  Do you know where a prominent person is living or what they get up to, is a celebrity having an affair that you know of, do you know anyone who’s on reality TV?  You can earn yourself good cash now by calling.

It then adds: “All sorts of people have been paid thousands of pounds by us for giving information that leads to a picture being sold or a story being written, are you a doorman, police worker, civil servant, probation officer, prison officer, nurse? Make some extra money without anyone ever knowing…”

Newspics is run by Matt Sprake a former forensics and surveillance officer for Scotland Yard who carried out anti-terrorism duties during his 10-year police career.

Sprake runs the agency with his wife, Marion, a banker who has been working for Barclays. He claims to have a network of 35 photographers, and a discreet studio “just 20 minutes from the City of London” for celebrity client portraits.

Part of his agency’s website is devoted to its “surveillance photography”, offering a menu of services, including “covert foot follows”, “covert vehicle follows” and ”remote technical surveillance”.

“You can utilise the very same skills that are used by the security services and the police,” clients are promised.  

“Our surveillance team has worked for and been trained by various police and government surveillance agencies within the UK. If you need it photographed without being seen, we are your experts.”

When contacted by Exaro, Sprake defended himself, saying that he had never paid a police officer or “anyone in authority” for information.

He said that he had wanted to remove the wording discovered by Exaro, but he was unable to do so because the website was “broken”.

“I wish I could change this website,” he said. “It was by three different companies and when one of them went bust, we could not change the website. It was a pain.”

But he told Exaro that he exercised caution with tip-offs: “I would not touch anything that is operational or compromising. We had people contact us on stories like the royal family, for example. My first question was, ‘How do you know that?’

“‘Well, I have heard it in a briefing.’

“‘Sorry, can’t touch it.’”

Sprake said that the wording on his agency’s website was “just advertising” aimed at the “general public”.

On the social-media website, Myspace, he puts his income at between £100,000 and £150,000 a year.

Sprake continued: “I used to work for a specialist department at the Met in Scotland Yard looking, basically, at terrorism work. The level I was working at involved very covert stuff.

“I got out after 10 years. You are limited on the number of years you are allowed to do, so I am now doing other work. But I have still got all that training that is very handy to have.”

He says that police officers contact him to “moan” about their conditions.

He also claims that his agency is “monitored by some departments in the Met for where some of our stories have come from.”

“You have got to be very careful whenever you get information from a police officer.

They are not going to be paid because it is obviously illegal.

The story will only be put forward if they have obtained that information through something that would be general information.

“If they ring up and say I have seen this bit of paper and this story is going on, well, we do not touch that because that would be highly illegal. So we are very careful.”

He said that most of the agency’s press work came directly from newspapers rather than information given by sources.

Mr Sprake said that he “adhered” to the code of conduct of the Press Complaints Commission (PCC), which is a claim made by his agency on its website in relation to its surveillance work.

However, a PCC spokesman said that the code did not apply to picture agencies or freelance photographers. “This highlights the same issue that Lord Leveson has already raised: whether agency photographers or the paparazzi, as well as editors, should be covered by the code.”

Exaro's full report of the investigation can be found by clicking here.

Big Banks Have Criminally Conspired Since 2005 to Rig $800 Trillion Dollar Market

But Receive Only a Light Slap on the Wrist

We noted Friday:

Barclays and other large banks – including Citigroup, HSBC, J.P. Morgan Chase, Lloyds, Bank of America, UBS, Royal Bank of Scotland– manipulated the world’s primary interest rate (Libor) which virtually every adjustable-rate investment globally is pegged to.

***

That means they manipulated a good chunk of the world economy.

We actually understated the impact of the Libor scandal.

Specifically, according to the CIA’s World Factbook, the global economy – as measured by the world’s gross domestic product – is less than $80 trillion.

In contrast, over $800 trillion dollars worth of investments are pegged to the Libor rate.   In other words, a market more than 10 times the size of the entire real world economy is effected by Libor.

As the Wall Street Journal reports today:

More than $800 trillion in securities and loans are linked to the Libor, including $350 trillion in swaps and $10 trillion in loans.

(Click here if you don’t have a subscription to the Journal).

Remember, the derivatives market is approximately $1,200 trillion dollars.  Interest rate derivatives comprise the lion’s share of all derivatives, and could blow up and take down the entire financial system.

The largest interest rate derivatives sellers include Barclays, Deutsche Bank, Goldman and JP Morgan … many of which are being exposed for manipulating Libor.

They have been manipulating Libor on virtually a daily basis since 2005.

They are still part of the group of banks which sets Libor every day, and none have been criminally prosecuted.

They have received a light slap on the wrist from regulators, which – as nobel economist Joe Stiglitz points out – is just the cost of doing business when fraud is the business model.

Indeed – as Bloomberg notes – they’re probably still manipulating the rate:

The U.K. bankers and regulators charged with reviewing Libor in the wake of regulatory probes are resisting calls to overhaul the rate because structural changes risk invalidating trillions of dollars of contracts.

The group, established by the British Bankers’ Association in March after probes into allegations that traders rigged the London interbank offered rate … won’t propose structural changes such as basing the rate on actual trades or taking away oversight of the benchmark from the BBA, the people said.

Libor is determined by a daily poll that asks banks to estimate how much it would cost them to borrow from each other for different timeframes and in different currencies. Because banks’ submissions aren’t based on real trades, academics and lawyers say they are open to manipulation by traders. At least a dozen firms are being probed by regulators worldwide for colluding to rig the rate, the benchmark for $350 trillion of securities.

“I don’t see a significant enhancement to the reputation of Libor without basing it on actual transactions,” said Rosa Abrantes-Metz, an economist with Global Economics Group, a New York-based consultancy, an associate professor with New York University’s Stern School of Business and the co-author of a 2008 paper entitled “Libor Manipulation?” [the manipulation was well-known in England in 2007,  Shah Gilani  warned of Libor manipulation in 2008, and Tyler Durden, Max Keiser and others started sounding the alarm at or around the same time.]

“It would only be disruptive if current quotes are inaccurate,” so resistance “is suspicious,” she said.

***

Traders interviewed by Bloomberg in March at three firms said they were given no guidance on how Libor should be set and there were no so-called Chinese walls preventing contact between the treasury staff charged with submitting the rate and traders who stood to profit on where Libor was set each day. They regularly discussed where Libor would be set with their colleagues and their counterparts at other firms, they said.

“Sadly the response looks to be very consistent with the response of policy makers to the banking disasters we’ve seen over the last four years — cosmetic changes, but nothing substantial happens,” said Richard Werner, a finance professor at the University of Southampton. “It’s insufficient and doesn’t really go to the heart of the problem.”