Export Goods

Nobody enjoys reminiscing about an old acquaintance as much as I do – especially when the acquaintance in question played an important role in the Department for Transport under the last Labour regime.

The legal proceedings that we started against the government – referred to in our previous posts – came to a stage when witness testimonies were called for and, as the whole action hinged upon our disclosures about the Gaul, the Derbyshire and the Trident investigations, we thought it beneficial to ask the Head of Shipping Policy in the DfT, Mrs Theresa Crossley, to contribute her inside knowledge to the case. (You will remember Mrs Crossley as the official who answered our more recent Freedom of Information requests in respect of the Derbyshire RFI.)

Well, to our disappointment and surprise, when we looked for her, we found that she was no longer there - she had been exported to Lisbon. Yes, as the March 2010 copy of the European Maritime Safety Agency’s newsletter informs us, on 16 February 2010, Theresa Crossley was amply rewarded with an appointment as head of the Department ‘B’, ‘Implementation’, in EMSA. That made our witness, from the UK legal action point of view, out of reach. We offered to pay her costs to either come to the UK or give a sworn statement from Lisbon, but were refused point blank. This was really a pity, given her tenure of the DfT key management post all through the turbulent years of the Gaul and the Trident RFIs. Just like us, Mrs Crossley knows very well where the whitened bones of the murdered formal investigations lay buried.  Amongst other similarly serious matters. Unlike us, she's not going to make a full disclosure.

It seems that EMSA has a penchant for collecting UK personnel with knowledge about the miscarriages of justice perpetrated under Labour. Is this pure coincidence or is it something akin to a collector’s fascination with artefacts of the past?

(More to come)