ICO: Private Investigator client names should be kept secret

Information commissioner Christopher Graham called on MPs not to publish the names of 98 clients of rogue private investigators when he appeared before the Home Affairs Select Committee yesterday.

The parliamentary watchdog gave the Serious and Organised Crime Agency (Soca) until Monday night to publish the list, saying they would otherwise publish it themselves. Soca did not publish the list.

Blue chip companies alleged to be on the client list include insurance company Allianz, broker Aon, financial services company Credit Suisse, and professional services firm Deloitte, according to newspaper reports.

Late on Sunday night, committee chairman Keith Vaz summoned Graham to appear before the committee yesterday. The commissioner has launched an investigation into whether the 98 clients breached the Data Protection Act and demanded the committee withhold the list until it is complete.

Graham told MPs that there was a danger that “justice would not be done” if they published the list because it would “complicate” his investigation as identified clients might start “trashing” evidence.

“If you are doing an investigation, you don’t want everybody in the community you are interested in to know what you are doing,” he said.

When the Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO) got cases to court it would have “a whole pile of information” that it would have to share with the defence, and court processes would be hampered, if some of this was already in the public domain.

Graham said his attitude towards the 98 clients on the list was that they were “innocent until they are proved guilty. “It’s very important that we look at the 98 and investigate the circumstances,” he said.

“Some people may have a public interest defence. It may be that there were people who knew that the information that was asked for was being obtained illegally, and there we have a prima facie case for action.”

Graham said he was pressing on with the investigation as quickly as possible, with six staff working on it, and a two week “scoping exercise” had begun on Friday to establish what it would involve.

“At the end of those 14 days, I will be in a position as information commissioner to say how that investigation is going to proceed and what warrants we will need,” he said.

Graham also called for breaches of privacy laws to be taken more seriously by police, ministers and courts and for more severe penalties for private investigators who broke the law than a £150 fine in a magistrate’s court.

“Parliament should demand that private information is kept private,” he said, adding that it was very difficult for the ICO to enforce privacy laws when they were supported by such a “weedy” penalty in a magistrates court.