By its nature corruption can be difficult to detect as it usually involves two or more people entering into a secret agreement. The agreement can be to pay a financial inducement to a public official for securing favour of some description in return. Keith Lyndsay Hunter is a former Scotland Yard detective who is the current CEO of Risc Management, a private investigations agency. He and the company are both under investigation by the Home Affairs Select Committee for corruption, due to its attempt to bribe officials in exchange for information about James Ibori’s case. Despite Keith Hunter’s bio stating that he ‘was involved in high-profile investigations of national and international organised crime during his career at New Scotland Yard’, Scotland Yard’s paperwork shows him to be a low-level figure and he was dismissed from service at Scotland Yard for gross misconduct in 1997.

Keith Hunter started at Scotland Yard, working as a low-level detective until his dismissal in 1997 for gross misconduct. Upon his dismissal, he began working for a company called ISC Global with a lawyer named Stephen Curtis. Since the company was owned by Menatep, a Russian bank, Curtis had many ties with Russian oligarchs including Mikhail Khodorkovsky. It is suspected that his relationship with the Russians led to death in a suspicious helicopter crash in 2004. After this, Keith Hunter teamed up with Cliff Knuckey and created RISC Management Limited, a private detective agency focussing on corporate investigations and business intelligence. RISC Management became involved in an investigation into convicted criminal James Ibori, a corrupt Nigerian politician who defrauded the government and is currently serving a 13-year prison sentence in the UK for money laundering and conspiracy to defraud.

At the beginning of this investigation, James Ibori’s lawyers, Speechly Bircham Solicitors , were contesting the freezing of James Ibori’s UK assets on the basis of the admissibility of evidence obtained by two New Scotland Yard Detectives, DC John McDonald and DC Nicholas Greenwood. Keith Hunter approached Speechly Bircham’s Ian Timlin with an offer to provide specific details of police activity surrounding the case and, over a period of twelve months, £20,000 worth of bribes was paid to DC McDonald and DI Gary Walters in exchange for information to help Speechly Bircham.In May 2012, Hunter and Knuckey were arrested for bribing DC MacDonald. Amongst the evidence produced there were alsoinvoices detailing the bribes paid, listed as ‘Cash payment made to above source for information provided’.

This was not the first time when Hunter has encountered problems with the law,as this had happened beforei n 2006, when The Times reported that illegal cash payments had been made to DS Gary Flood, who worked in the Yard’s Extradition Unit and had close links with Hunter. At the time, Hunter claimed that he and Flood were friends and that they shared a joint bank account for horseracing purposes. At present, RISC and Keith Hunter are under investigation by the Home Affairs Select Committee. From his previous activities and connections, Hunter has access to a multitude of sensitive data about many politicians and the Met Police. If Hunter is allowed to use this information to his advantage, he may be able to evade conviction altogether. If you want to find out more about Keith Hunter, make sure you visit the websitekeithhunter2014.wordpress.com.

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