FOUR MCCANN INVESTIGATORS HAVE BEEN ARRESTED SINCE WORKING FOR THE MCCANN TEAM – AND THREE HAVE SPENT TIME IN JAIL

FOCUS ON Julián Peribañez

It’s an amazing record.

First, the lead detective working for the McCann Team, Antonio Jiminez Raso, is arrested on 18 February 2008 on suspicion of assisting a violent, 27-strong criminal gang to steal 40kg of cocaine from a boat in Barcelona harbour, and other offences. Admittedly, four years later, he was acquitted - but only after the judge made sharp observations about how he and other police officers had got ‘far too close’ to leading gang members. He was finally released last year - but only after spending four years in jail.

Then, on 19 October 2009, the McCanns’ leading investigator during 2008, Kevin Halligen, was arrested, wanted in the U.S. for a $2 million fraud, to which he recently pleaded guilty. He spent three years in Belmarsh top security prison, fighting extradition with the help of the British Legal Aid scheme. Now he’s holed up in a U.S. jail, having spent nearly four years in prison.

Two of their investigators in jail for four years each was bad enough.

But earlier this year came news that a third man hired by the McCanns to look for Madeleine has been jailed: Julián Peribañez. He may not be a name that rings a loud bell, even for Madeleine McCann researchers, but he has had a significant role for the McCanns, as we shall see in a moment.

The fourth McCann man to have been arrested was Francisco Marco, the boss of Metodo 3. He and Peribañez were arrested in February this year as part of a police investigation into spying. Peribañez admitted his crime - illegally taping the conversations of politicians - and was remanded in custody. According to press reports (see below), Marco was arrested, but not remanded in custody.   

More about Julián Peribañez

So what do we know about  Julián Peribañez, the third McCann employee (so far) to be thrown in jail?

He was arrested earlier this year when police arrested four former members of Metodo 3. That news report was covered in this thread:

http://jillhavern.forumotion.net/t6558p10-metodo-3-allegedly-involved-in-espionage-cases-in-spain-update-francisco-marco-arrested

As far as I can see, there have been no updates into how the police’s investigation into Metodo 3 is going.

Peribañez in Praia da Luz

Peribañez can be spotted on this YouTube video:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-74ragUCC8Y

…placed on YouTube by ‘fgordon666’. He tries hard to hide his face from the camera. He gets into a car with a baseball hat inscribed with ‘NYPD’ = New York Police Department. Later in the same video, we see Brian Kennedy strolling through the streets of Praia da Luz with a young man behind him. That’s his son Patrick Kennedy, usually called ‘Paddy’. Paddy’s roles included shadowing fellow McCann Team investigator Gary Hagland, with whom Peribañez worked closely (see below). Looking carefully at the papers being carried by Peribañez, they seem to include some ‘phone numbers – and the initials ‘GNR; can also be seen on his scrap of paper.

Peribañez interviews the ‘Jensen sisters’

An article by ‘Blackwatch’ on the old ‘Sargent’s Inn’ blog also refers to Peribañez; this time he’s interviewing the Jensen sisters, along with his co-worker Gary Hagland. Here’s an extract from Blackwatch’s article: “Playing Doubles: Jayne Jensen, Annie Wiltshire and the Missing Police Statements” (Author Blackwatch (of 17/04/2011 @ 14:09:49, in Business Environments, viewed 1057 times, extracted from waybackmachine)

QUOTE

Concluding a fresh look at some of the key witnesses in the case, I thought I'd flag up the account provided by Maidstone sisters, Jayne Marie Jensen and Annie Wiltshire.

The two sisters hit the headlines in the last week of December 2007 when the Daily Mail  claimed that the pair had seen Robert Murat outside the apartment on the night of Madeleine's disappearance, contradicting Murat's claim that he was at home at this time with his mother. Their claims can be broken down into these basic points:

• they allege they saw Robert Murat near the apartment complex at about 10.30pm, some 30 minutes after Kate McCann raised the alarm.
• that Robert acted as their translator in their initial interviews with Police.
• that although being interviewed by Police three times during those first few days, they were not asked to provide a formal statement until six months later when they spoke to Kent Police for 11 hours and also Gary Hagland and Julián Peribañez of Metodo 3.
• that they were in the same daily tennis coaching group as Mr McCann.
• that Robert had joined them briefly at their table on the night of May 4th to enquire if they had remembered anything else.

 

They also claimed to have seen two blond men earlier in the day Madeleine was reported missing.

The Daily Telegraph and Sky News both repeated the claims in subsequent days, the Daily Telegraph attempting to play down the claims of the sisters by suggesting that the police's failure to interview the pair had arisen as a result of them staying in another apartment block. But it's not a persuasive argument by any means. Several witnesses asked to provide formal statements were staying in different apartment blocks, including Neil Berry (in Block 6 across the road), Rajinder Balu and Jeremy Wilkins. Berry and Balu even mention having drinks with the two sisters Jayne and Annie in each of their respective statements.

And here's something else I don't understand; Neil Berry made THREE statements in all. He refers to two of the earlier statements in his final statement dated April 23^rd 2008. However, both his May 7th 2007 and  January 8th 2008 statements are missing from the final police files.

Secondly, the statements that Jensen and Wiltshire claim to have provided to DC Jo Godfrey and DC Bob Sidoli of Kent Police at the end of an eleven hour interview in October 2007 are also missing from the files.

Neil Berry was later asked to supply a buccal swab in response to a witness account that placed him in the stairwell of apartment 5A on the night of May 3rd. The account - provided in September 2007 by an Ocean Club employee - was subsequently transformed into a sensational exclusive for The Daily Mirror on September 29th: 'New Madeleine suspect seen in stairwell’…

UNQUOTE

Much more could be written about evidence given by Jayne Jensen and Annie Wiltshire. And what we are not told here or in any other newspaper account  is whether  Gary Hagland and Julián Peribañez interviewed the Jensen sisters before or after they gave their 11-hour account to Kent Police. I suspect very much that it was before.

An article about Metodo 3 and Julián Peribañez

This article can be found at: http://www.mccannfiles.com/id105.html  - and probably first appeared in April 2008

The following approximate translation appears there:

 

“Julián Peribáñez is a detective. The agency of Julián Peribáñez, detective of the agency Metodo 3, has taken seven months searching for Madeleine. And contrary to what the Portuguese cops think, they are looking for her alive. More than 20 detectives have worked simultaneously on the case. An exorbitant cost. [Note: The Spanish word would be “exorbitante,” but I can’t think of any other way to translate it.] They have checked more than 2,500 clues and have followed a hundred in Argentina, Mexico, Morocco, Bosnia, Portugal...

 

He says: “We continue to look for Madeleine alive. Otherwise we would not be doing it,"  convinced. He does not scorn the Portuguese police, but he follows the trail of the British investigators: Maddie is alive; the parents have nothing to do with it; the Portuguese feel they are being treated like a colony and are going at it the easy way”.

 

The arrest of former Metodo 3 detectives

 

This article appeared in El Pais, 19 February 2013

 

“Police officers on Tuesday searched the Barcelona and Madrid offices of Método 3, the now-defunct private detective firm at the centre of a political spying scandal in Catalonia. Investigators, including two anti-corruption prosecutors, were seen bringing out boxes of confiscated documents from the buildings.

The agency's owner, Francisco Marco, and three other detectives at the agency were arrested on Monday. The entire case has rocked Spain's political foundations after recordings surfaced of a 2010 lunch conversation between the head of the Popular Party in Catalonia, Alicia Sánchez-Camacho, and the former girlfriend of one of the sons of the region's ex-premier.

The ex-girlfriend, Victoria Álvarez, informed Sánchez-Camacho about Jordi Pujol Ferrusola's alleged money laundering activities in Andorra. Pujol Ferrusola is a son of former regional premier Jordi Pujol Soley, who served from 1980 to 2003.

Two of the suspects, Julián Peribañez and Alex Borrequero, who are still in custody, told investigators that they recorded the conversation ‘on the boss's orders’ [i.e. Francisco Marco] at the La Camarga restaurant in Barcelona. The ruling Catalan nationalist CiU bloc has organised a special squad of investigators and court personnel to help those politicians or other citizens who feel that they may have been spied on”.

 

Shades of Hacked Off!

 

This longer, trnjslated article by C. Morcillo/P. Muñoz appeared in ABC the following day (20 February 2013):

‘Método 3 grew with high-profile media cases; their enemies label it as ‘scam agency’ - and now it's going to be a consultancy agency’

Each time a new chief of police arrived to Catalonia, one of the first invitations he would receive was that of Francisco Marco: a letter to invite him to have dinner at the restaurant “La Camarga”, which has been the hub of operations [spy activities] of the detective agency Método 3, near to its headquarters. The current police chief, Eugenio Castro, politely declined the invitation, however his predecessor and some of the previous ones shared table and cloth with the influential Marco, with a degree in Law and an expert in self-promotion. One of his mottoes is “Let them speak about us, whether good or bad”, says one of his former colleagues.

Marco took to practice that popularity and in recent years his agency was a reference in the media, particularly after the parents of the British girl Madeleine McCann who disappeared in Portugal hired them to search her. Their hypothesis was that a paedophile ring had kidnapped her and in pursuit of that idea, according to the same sources, they charged about 70,000 euros [close to that amount] per month, with continuous trips to Portugal, Morocco and Britain.

Ghost expenses

“It was a scam. They said they had fifteen people working on the case but, no, there were just three. [Note: two of them were Antonio Jimenez Raso and Julián Peribañez. They made up invoices for hotel expenses and allowances for four people in the neighbouring country [Portugal] and only one person travelled there, who in addition didn’t speak a word of Portuguese.

“Along with Madeleine's case - of which nothing was ever found - the fame reached Método 3 with the advent of the former secret service spy Francisco Paesa [ see Guardian article here: http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2011/nov/29/spanish-superspy-franciso-paesa ], who was ‘found’ in Paris, after being presumed dead [he had published his own obituary].

“Monitoring the vice-presidents of FC Barcelona and the involvement, which has yet to be clarified, of espionage of the current president of the Community of Madrid, Ignacio Gonzalez, are also included in the curriculum of this agency in which ‘thousands and thousands of euro have come in and no one know where they are’, says a detective who knows Método 3 track record.

Severance pay

“The agency was created by Marita Frnandez, the mother of Francisco Marco, in 1985. She had worked has a saleswoman for an Argentinian detective when she married her husband, a criminal lawyer. Since then they have lived years of success and constant commissions - although nothing to do with the 20,000 reports that were said to be destroyed by the Director of Método 3 - to the point of giving work to other agencies and individuals (they subcontracted) and then signed themselves those jobs. Their wide list of staff included an accountant, and in recent years, a former policeman heading the IT department.

“Juan Carlos Ruiloba was the chief of the Technological Crime Prevention unit at the Judiciary Police of Barcelona. Shifting to a second activity, he began working for Marco where he claimed he was very well paid. A little over a year ago, when the agency started to be less the buoyant business that it had been, Ruiloba left Método 3. According to sources related to the investigation, part of the money that he was owed was recovered with electronic equipment. Last week this former police officer turned to his former colleagues at the Judiciary and handed material, supposedly ‘sensitive’. He had waited over a year to do so.

Out of hand investigations

“He was not the only police officer connected to Método 3 Director. In fact, during many years it was a common practice to resort to certain professionals, such as the Forensic Science Police [Lab], in order to do specific tests, particularly when they did not have any other means at their disposal.

“The agency no longer exists officially since last November, in fact its Director has several pending labour disputes with former employees. However Marco, with a curriculum and voluminous list of customers, was already converting their business into a security consulting firm, outside of the police control to which detective agencies are subject.

“Método 3 has also been inspected - inspection in the offices of detectives are annual - however he has eluded comfortably both administrative and criminal penalties. In 1995 his father, his mother, him and a brother were arrested for illegally wiretapping businessmen. In that case it was revealed that they had investigated the governor of the Bank of Spain, Mariano Rubio, and his wife Carmen Posadas. The investigation was filed.

“In 2011, during a routine inspection, the Police detected serious irregularities, despite the proposed sanction, which arrived to Rubalcaba's Home Office - his brother has an excellent relationship with Marita Fernández - it was also unsuccessful.

“In May last year the agency number two, Elisenda Villena, was arrested during the ‘Pitiusa Operation’* - in which hundreds of detectives and intermediaries were charged. The agency log book - mandatory where clients and those who are investigated are recorded, as well as the dates of the jobs carried out - disappeared, because it was ‘lost in a flood’. Método 3, again, was not penalized.

Julián Peribañez on social media

 

Julián Peribañez appears to be on social media as follows (I am not 100% sure though).

Facebook, where he has 2 friends: https://www.facebook.com/juliusmc#!/juliusmc/about

Twitter, where he has 4 followers: https://twitter.com/jperibanez

Linked In:  http://es.linkedin.com/in/julianperibanezgiraud    Note, there are some gaps in his CV, including this period:  November 2007 to May 2008, which is precisely the time he was said to be working for the McCanns/Metodo 3.

The McCanns were made arguidos on 8 September 2007, as this video reminds us: