JACK STRAW, the former foreign secretary, instructed diplomats to lobby for the release of a convicted criminal described by police and customs intelligence reports as a leading smuggler of heroin into Britain.
Foreign Office telegrams ordered efforts to secure “the immediate release” from a German jail in 2001 of Andreas Antoniades who worked for years as a paid informer for Customs. At the time, he was wanted in Greece on drugs smuggling charges.
Although police or customs informers routinely receive rewards in cash, or reduced sentences if they are prosecuted, Straw’s attempt to help Antoniades avoid trial appears at odds with Customs’ code of practice, which states: “Informants have no licence to commit crime.”
Antoniades, who has never been convicted of a drug offence, was released shortly after the Straw telegrams and has since moved to Dubai.
According to former police officials and intelligence reports, Antoniades, 75, was one of three leading agents for Customs inside the gangs who have flooded Britain with billions of pounds of heroin since the early 1990s. One senior former drugs intelligence officer described the three as being, at one time, among the top five suspected heroin importers into Britain.
Former customs officials say leading drug smugglers often work as moles, motivated by the prospect of destroying rivals or hoping for an “insurance policy” to reduce their sentence if they are convicted. Intelligence from such sources has led to the seizure of huge hauls of drugs. But some question if they also win too much protection.
Antoniades, who confirmed to a Sunday Times reporter two years ago that he had made about £300,000 as a registered informant for Customs, is a Greek Cypriot who was first recruited in the 1950s by Britain to inform on Eoka, a guerrilla group fighting British control of Cyprus.
In 1959, Antoniades was resettled in Britain and turned to crime. He was jailed for four years for “wounding with intent” in a gun attack in west London. Over the following decades, however, Antoniades continued as an informer and became what one Customs official said was “one of the best we ever had”.
In the 1990s, suspicions grew, whether well-founded or not, that he was working with Turkish and Kurdish gangsters. One Customs officer reported that he was “suspected of being involved in organising large shipments of heroin being imported to the UK by various methods”.
But when arrested in Germany in 2001, according to an investigation by BBC Radio 4’s File on 4, to be broadcast on Tuesday, British officials tried to help him avoid trial. One telegram from Straw to the British embassy in Berlin on July 31, 2001, asked officials to “press the case for Mr Antoniades’ release immediately” with state and federal justice ministers. Officials were told to point out that “a public trial in Greece would reveal Mr Antoniades’ long career as an informant for Customs and Excise (1987 to date) and put his life at risk from criminal elements”.
But Straw’s instructions angered staff at the National Criminal Intelligence Service. One former senior officer at the agency, which has since been abolished, said: “At this very time we were preparing to target Antoniades for significant intelligence-led operations. How would the Germans and Greeks have reacted if we subsequently arrested him?”
Antoniades could not be traced for comment last week.
He is not the only controversial informant said to have been used by Customs. Others have included Huseyin Baybasin, head of a Kurdish gang accused of heroin smuggling.
Supported by witnesses, Baybasin claims he and his family moved from Turkey in the 1990s with the help of the British government after he agreed to provide information about the complicity of the Turkish government in smuggling. Baybasin, whose gang was said at one time to control 90% of the heroin trafficked into Britain, is serving life in a Dutch jail after being convicted of conspiracy to murder, drug trafficking and kidnap. He has always denied any involvement in the narcotics trade.

- Sunday Times

Stephen Grey argues that when governments are so feeble, unions so weak and corporations so powerful, we should welcome the “compensation culture”

Everyone has their favourite story of the American culture of compensation.
Mine came towards the end of last year from the Iowa court of appeals, which
upheld a jury’s award of $41,267 to a shopper, Judy Krenk, who slipped on a
grape at a supermarket checkout. The parties agreed that “a customer, other
than Krenk, dropped the grape while bagging groceries”, reported the Des
Moines Register. The judge, while noting that “the evidence in support of
Krenk’s claim is less than overwhelming”, said that supermarket employees
“should have known” there was a smashed grape on the floor.
Are we, too, developing a compensation culture? Newspapers highlight such
cases as that of a policewoman recently paid £125,000 for the stress of
working undercover. Concern about the creation of “an atmosphere of distrust
and suspicion” was expressed by the Prince of Wales last year in private
letters to the Lord Chancellor. Solicitors are frequently accused of
“leading on” the victims of accidents for which nobody is really to blame.
Yet there is scant evidence that Britain has anything like a US-style
compensation culture. But, first, another question that is rarely posed: Is
a compensation culture really such a bad thing? Governments are increasingly
reluctant to restrain private companies directly – for example, by imposing
environmental controls that would stop a power plant being built where it
might pollute drinking water, or by introducing laws that would restrain
banks from recommending worthless “investment opportunities”. In such
circumstances, the ordinary person’s only redress against the big and
powerful, and the only hope of persuading companies to act responsibly, is
through the courts. Likewise, when unions have had their powers drastically
curtailed and ministers are reluctant to limit working hours, the threat
that employees will sue companies for ill-health caused by stress is the
only way left of improving workplace conditions. Whatever the law’s
shortcomings, it can be more effective at holding corporations to account
than governments, which are all too often under the influence of private
lobbyists.
The US compensation culture may have led to customers of McDonald’s winning
fortunes for the pain of having hot coffee spilt on them – the worst
consequence of which is that American filter coffee is now undrinkably
lukewarm. But the same culture has created incentives for US companies – in
a country that supposedly abhors regulation – to deal with asbestos
injuries, diet drugs, faulty cars and vans, life insurance sales products
and tobacco additives. Thirty years of compensation litigation have forced
manufacturers to re-engineer their products and make them the most
consumer-friendly in the world – from child- proof cigarette lighters to
ergonomically designed keyboards. In the UK, even as our courts reject
similar consumer legal actions, we free-ride off the innovation that
attention to safety in the US has encouraged.
In the US, investors will get roughly $3bn in compensation from Wall Street
banks that encouraged investments in dotcom companies from which they were
earning banking fees. At least one US financial magazine considers this a
derisory sum. Here, the compensation for victims of the Potters Bar rail
crash in May 2002 is likely to be in the low thousands. The victims included
Agnes Quinlivan, whose daughters were paid an initial £10,000 and had a
subsequent claim for damages rejected by Railtrack. Legal aid to challenge
this and other awards has been denied. Insurance cover for solicitors to
fight the claims on a “no win, no fee” basis has also been refused. Yet
Railtrack was widely praised for saying that, without accepting legal
liability, it would pay compensation to the victims as though it were fully
liable. Colin Smith, Agnes Quinlivan’s son-in-law, argues that “Railtrack
lied to us when they promised to deal with the families’ cases with sympathy
and care”.
Britain, then, has not so much a compensation culture as a compensation
deficit. Louise Christian, solicitor for the Potters Bar families, says that
in America, they might get a million dollars or more. She compares the
Potters Bar victims with those of the Lockerbie bombing. Negotiations led by
US lawyers secured a $10m pay-out from Libya for each victim’s family,
regardless of their economic circumstances or whether they had dependants.
Walter Olson, a fellow of the conservative think-tank the Manhattan
Institute (and an opponent of the compensation culture who argues that
litigation has produced more safety in the US than you could ever want),
agrees that £10,000 would be a piffling sum for a fatality in the US. “It
would be more or less just the rounding error in the calculations,” he says.
“Although it varies from state to state, you could expect maybe a hundred
times more to be paid out.”
Olson points to the example of nine-year-old Perrize Washington, who drowned
on 13 June 2001 while on a field trip to a YMCA pool in Jackson,
Mississippi. After a trial televised on Court TV, the case was settled last
November for close to the family lawyer’s demand of $10m.

By international standards, the British compensation bill is still low. A
study last year found that as a percentage of GDP, the UK has the lowest
tort cost in the industrialised world – 0.6 per cent against, for example,
1.9 per cent in the US, 1.7 per cent in Italy, 1.3 per cent in Germany and
1.1 per cent in Australia. The belief that compensation is bleeding the
nation dry and that lawyers are constantly on the prowl is largely a myth
spread by the insurance industry to persuade more people to take out
policies. Over the past three years, accident claims filed to the British
government’s Compensation Recovery Unit have actually fallen from 743,593 to
706,715.
It is probably true that the number of employment compensation claims has
risen. But companies complain that insurance companies often find it easier
to accept dodgy claims and subsequently raise premiums than to contest bad
cases.
As for medicine, the problem is not so much an excess of compensation
demands as an excess of deference in the face of medical incompetence, as
shown by the cases of Harold Shipman and the Bristol Royal Infirmary, which
was able to continue for years with an alarmingly high death rate following
heart surgery on children.
Disputing Doctors, a little-noticed but powerful book by Linda Mulcahy
published last year, showed, for example, that most medical mistakes rarely
lead to complaints, let alone lawsuits – even in the US. The most
comprehensive study of medical mistakes, she wrote, found that in American
hospitals, nearly 4 per cent of patients suffered an injury which prolonged
their stay or resulted in a measurable disability; nearly 14 per cent of
these injuries were fatal. This is equivalent to 18,000 Americans dying each
year due to preventable mistakes in hospital. (A smaller-scale study in the
UK found that 7 per cent of patients suffer mistakes.) Yet, according to a
study in 1985, only one in 25 negligent injuries results in compensation. A
more recent study found seven times as many medical mistakes as compensation
claims.
Allegations that the new no win, no fee system in Britain encourages
compensation claims are false. The introduction of no win, no fee was
followed by the withdrawal of legal aid for most personal i
njury cases. If
anything, the new system makes things worse for the accident victim, because
it gives lawyers little incentive to pursue cases that aren’t “dead certs”.
In the US, lawyers can claim up to 30 per cent of the damages they recover;
in the UK, they receive only a small “uplifted fee”, which provides little
incentive to take on an expensive and risky case.
There is also a difficulty in taking on big corporations under English law.
Under the US system, each side pays its own costs. In England, if the
alleged victim loses the case, he or she pays the company’s costs, including
its expensive lawyers. The English system also prevents a lawsuit being
brought on behalf of an entire class of victims. The consequence, says
Stephen Alexander, a partner of Class Law solicitors, is that if a company
makes an illegal profit – for example, by fixing prices or giving
negligently bad investment advice – there is “no plan for the disgorgement
of that ill-gotten gain back to the victims”.
The UK should probably not follow America all the way. It would be a good
thing to bring many disputes out of the poisonous and expensive atmosphere
of the courtroom – a third of all compensation payments is absorbed by
administrative and legal costs – and into mediation. But we should try to
increase public access to the law and strengthen, rather than diminish, the
culture of compensation. Whether the bad guys are Microsoft or BP, we can’t
leave it to US courts to police our corporate world.