iNews Cayman has published a number of stories on Martin Bridger, the lead investigator of the notorious Tempura investigation into alleged corruption within the Royal Cayman Islands Police Service (RCIPS). Bridger was sent out here although he was already one of the self titled “The Untouchables” and we questioned why he was chosen in the first place because of his somewhat negative reputation.

The cost to the public purse, we said in September, was over CI$10M and John Evans, the ex Cayman Net News reporter who was partly instrumental in the commencement of the investigation, immediately sent me an email saying it was over $30M. I have no reason to doubt him. Mr. Evans says there are documents in the public domain showing on 30 August 2007 Leigh Turner, the Foreign and Commonwealth Officer’s Director of Overseas Territories, contacted the Commissioner of the Metropolitan Police for assistance in what became Operation Tempura. “That was well before” his involvement.

Evans also claims that, “attempts [were] made during Dan Duguay’s 2009 audit of Tempura/Cealt to cover up what had really happened. Thanks to Freedom of Information (FOI) it is now clear that this financial investigation was fatally compromised by what appears to be deliberate misinformation so the audit of the operations needs to re-visited and completed.”

Since our stories both CNS and the Caymanian Compass have done additional stories on Tempura and Martin Bridger and it not my intention to repeat what has been done before.

However, it would be remiss for me not to ask when will this costly debacle end? When are we the people of the Cayman Islands who are indirectly paying for an investigation we never asked for, going to be told the ‘secrets’ Tempura and its associate Cealt investigation revealed? The “we” here includes the Government of the Cayman Islands. Not one elected member of the legislature here instigated the investigation and even was left out of the loop in its fact (or dubious fact) finding. The investigation was ordered by then Governor Stuart Jack, representative of the Crown and taking orders from the UK, after talks with then Commissioner of Police, Stuart Kernohan, who was then subject himself to being investigated. He lost his job as a result and is currently suing for wrongful dismissal.

To answer my own question, when will we ever be told the secrets? We won’t. They will remain secret. And there lies the rub. We pay and the UK say or in this case don’t say.

To even prevent disclosure of this secret (and obviously sensitive) information being disclosed in a civil suit filed by Kernohan, our attorney general has run us up a bill of over $584,000 and rising. Our delightful Mr. Bridger ran off with documents relating to his investigation containing this secretive and sensitive information. It is a known fact that Bridger kept copious notes.

In another email to me which he has published elsewhere, Evans says, “You might also revisit the two conflicting FOI releases made by RCIPS and the Met relating to the documentation from the early stages of Operation Tempura, which I believe is currently the subject of A.G. – v – Martin Bridger. These show that a substantial amount of documentation was removed from the Cayman Islands and sent to the Met in London but the Met have no trace of it.
As several people have noted in the past, “You couldn’t make all this up if you tried.”

One thing I can say about John Evans. He is tenacious and will not give up in trying to find out the secretive information. I hope he succeeds and if he does, whichever media house he tells will have the scoop of the decade.

In the meantime Bridger will be popping up on our radar and continually making news. And every time it is at our cost. We just pay and receive a big fat ZERO!