Wednesday, December 17, 2014

# 71 Freedom in Information (Data Protection) documents reveal that the Foreign & Commonwealth Office has been playing fast and loose with the truth!



James Ricketson
316 Whale Beach Road
Palm Beach 2108
Sydney, Australia

Mr Phillip Hammond
Foreign Secretary
Parliamentary House of Commons
London SW1A                                                                                   

17th   Dec. 2014

Dear Foreign Secretary

I received the following in an email from Mr Fletcher yesterday:

Dear James,

I have finally received some of the documents promised to me under the legal FOI act, better late than never I presume. There are more than 400 documents in no order whatever, in fact many blank and half blank pages, therefore almost impossible for an old man like me to make sense of them. There is no logical legal reason given why they will not accept you as my legal power of attorney…

Despite the obstacles placed in his way by Ms Sue Bennett, Mr Fletcher has been able to glean some interesting insights into the fate of his passport from the documents she has provided him with:

28th July 2010

“(Name redacted) will take n/a’s passport to the IDC tomorrow so he was withdraw his money from the Western Union.”

Six days before Mr Fletcher was due to fly to the United Kingdom (4th August) the British Embassy in Thailand, by its own admission, was in possession of his passport.

23rd May 2011

Note acquired through Data Protection, name redacted, that reads:

“I told Mr Fletcher we are now holding his passport.”

The British Embassy in Bangkok is still in possession of Mr Fletcher’s passport 10 months later.

29th Jan 2013

Note acquired through Data Protection, name redacted (though we know that it is Julian Blewett), that reads:

“I visited David Fletcher on 24th Jan. I explained to David that we received his letter a few days earlier but I did not write back because I knew we would come to see him that day. I explained to him that….his passport was returned to the Passport Section in July 2012 among the recovered passports and was already destroyed by mistake.”

Destroyed by mistake! How, within the confines of a presumably secure Embassy, is it possible to destroy a passport by mistake? Fire? Flood? More importantly:

Where was Mr Fletcher’s passport between 23rd May 2011 and July 2012?

Tanida Apivisuttirux, Pro Consul wrote to Mr Fletcher on 21st Feb 2013 to confirm the mistaken cancellation of Mr Fletcher’s passport:

...”your passport was cancelled due to the Embassy’s mistake”

In Jan 2013 Mr Fletcher’s passport had been ‘destroyed’. In Feb 2013 it had been cancelled!

7th Nov. 2014

In response to my question “Why did the British Embassy cancel Mr Fletcher’s passport?” Ross Allen, Acting Director Consular Services, wrote:

“When a British passport is found and handed into an Embassy, the policy of Her Majesty’s Passport Office (HMPO) is that the passport will not be returned to the holder because we do not know who has had possession of the passport in the intervening period. During this time the passport may have been tampered with, cloned or otherwise compromised and therefore have become a security risk. Mr Fletcher’s passport was received at the British Embassy with no accompanying explanation. I am therefore satisfied that consular staff acted appropriately in cancelling it to HMPO.”

How does Ross Allen account for the whereabouts of Mr Fletcher’s passport between 23rd May 2011 (when it was held by the British Embassy in Thailand) and July 2012, when it was ‘returned’ to the British Embassy in Thailand?

The only way that Ross Allen’s statement quoted here makes sense is if, somehow, the British Embassy in Thailand lost or misplaced Mr Fletcher’s passport outside the confines of the Embassy after 23rd May 2011! How could this be possible?

Then, somehow, 14 months later, someone outside the confines of the Embassy found Mr Fletcher’s passport and handed it in to the Embassy – “with no accompanying explanation.” And no-one at the Embassy put 2 and 2 together and figured out that the passport that had mysterious appeared belonged to a British citizen who was currently in a Thai prison.

Under what circumstances was the passport returned after its 14 month sojourn outside the Embassy?

The problems with Ross Allen’s account do not end here. Tanida Apivisuttirux refers to mistaken cancellation, Julian Blewett refers to mistaken destruction whilst Ross Allen refers to the cancellation’ destruction as having taken place in accordance with established protocols.

Ross Allen’s account of what happened to Mr Fletcher’s passport cannot be reconciled with Tanida Apivisuttirux and Julian Blewett’s accounts. And none of these three accounts can be reconciled with the documented evidence Mr Fletcher now has in his possession.

The documented evidence suggests overwhelmingly that the British Embassy had Mr Fletcher’s passport in its uninterrupted possession from 3rd August 2010, at least, until July 2012 – when it was first cancelled and then destroyed.

Who ordered the cancellation and destruction of Mr Fletcher’s passport? The answer to this question is not to be found in any of the documents Mr Fletvher has been provided.

Given that Ambassador Mark Kent, Julian Blewett and Ross Allen all knew that Mr Fletcher required his passport as evidence in his defense in his court case in Cambodia (if such had ever been granted him) it is difficult to escape the conclusion that at the very highest level within the British Embassy in Thailand and within the Foreign & Commonwealth Service there has been a conspiracy to pervert the course of justice with the wanton destruction of Mr Fletcher’s passport. 

Clearly, the Foreign & Commonwealth Office cannot investigate itself. The question of what happened to Mr Fletcher’s passport should be placed in the hands of Scotland Yard such that an independent investigation can be made into  how and why evidence required by Mr Fletcher was destroyed, who ordered its destruction and why.

best wishes

James Ricketson


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