Tottenham have been accused of spying on London Olympic officials in the latest twist to the saga surrounding the main stadium for next year’s Games.
A 29-year-old man has been arrested on suspicion of fraud after Olympic Park Legacy Company (OPLC) chairwoman Baroness Ford said the north London football club had private investigators tail all 14 members of her board.
With the future of the STG500 ($A780m) showpiece venue up in the air following the collapse of the West Ham deal, the suspect was questioned on Tuesday as officers conducted searches in London, including Westminster, and southern England.
Baroness Ford is in charge of the OPLC – the body formed to secure the Olympic Park’s legacy.
‘The thing that I have learned in the last 12 months is that there has been all kinds of behaviour,’ she told the London Assembly.
‘There has been legal challenges and people have stood behind it anonymously – all kinds of things have happened.
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A French court has fined energy giant EDF 1.5 million euros (£1.3 million) and sent two of its staff to jail for spying on Greenpeace campaigners.
The company is hoping to build four nuclear reactors in the UK.
A court in Nanterre, near Paris, found that EDF employed security firm Kargus to spy on Greenpeace as it campaigned against new reactors in France.
The court also sent two Kargus employees to jail and handed Greenpeace 500,000 euros (£428,000) in damages.
Greenpeace’s campaign targeted in particular the new reactor being built at Flammanville on the Normandy coast, one of the European Pressurised Water Reactors (EPRs) that EDF hopes to bring to the UK.
Adelaide Colin, communications director for Greenpeace in France, said the decision “sends a strong signal to the nuclear industry: no-one is above the law”.
The court heard that in 2006 Kargus Consultants, then run by a former member of the French foreign secret service, compiled a dossier on Greenpeace via means that included hacking into a computer belonging to former campaigns head Yannick Jadot.
EDF maintained that it had just asked Kargus to monitor the activists, and that the consultants had exceeded their remit.
But justice Isabelle Prevost-Desprez disagreed, handing three-year sentences to Pascal Durieux and Pierre-Paul Francois, head and deputy head of EDF’s nuclear security operation.
Thierry Lorho, then head of Kargus, also received three years, and information specialist Alain Quiros two.
All also have to pay compensation to Greenpeace.
EDF did not return calls from BBC News, but its lawyer told Reuters news agency in Paris that the company would appeal against the decision.
Rainbow echoes
Through its ownership of British Energy, EDF runs eight nuclear stations in the UK and plans to build four new reactors, two each at Sizewell in Suffolk and Hinkley Point in Somerset.
The case has brought back memories of the sinking of Rainbow Warrior in 1985
These will probably be EPRs.
Although EDF and the constructors Areva laud the EPR’s substantial power and safety features, the two in construction at Flammanville and Olkiluoto in Finland are both behind schedule and over budget.
Tom Burke, formerly head of Friends of the Earth UK and a visiting professor at Imperial and University Colleges in London, said the spying case showed EDF was desperate to negate criticism of nuclear power.
“What this judgement reveals is that EDF, and the French government which owns it, are prepared to go to any lengths, including breaking the law, in order to defeat opposition to more nuclear power,” he told BBC News.
“The whole future of the French plan to sell more nuclear power to the world depends on getting the British consumer to pay to build new nuclear reactors in Britain.
“I would advise every critic of the French drive to expand nuclear power in Britain to be very vigilant in ensuring they are not themselves victims of EDF dirty tricks.”
Greenpeace has said in the past that it suspected EDF of using “dirty tricks” against it in the UK as well as in France – a charge that the company has denied.
In the wake of the French verdict, Greenpeace has asked the company to “come clean”.
For some, this episode evokes memories of the Rainbow Warrior sinking in New Zealand in 1985.
Then, with French government backing, foreign intelligence service personnel mined and sank the Greenpeace vessel in a bid to prevent it interfering with nuclear testing in the Pacific.
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The crime of espionage once conjured images of dark street corners, fedora-wearing spies and government agents who stayed in the shadows, rarely seeing the inside of a public courtroom.
These days, the game has changed. The same agents are now looking for different kinds of spies, ones who increasingly threaten corporate America — while they’re working within it.
The crime is called economic espionage and it has catapulted to one of the top federal law enforcement priorities in the country.
It often involves American-based employees who burrow into company computer systems, steal prized trade secrets and hand over the information to overseas competitors for tens of thousands — even millions — of dollars.
The FBI has placed economic espionage on both a national and local level second on its list of priorities, right behind fighting terrorism.
That’s because the potential for damage is severe, law enforcement officials say, with the potential loss to companies in the tens of billions of dollars and, according to one expert, growing at a rate of 9 percent a year.
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ANCHORAGE, Alaska (AP) — The U.S. Army charged an Alaska-based soldier Monday with attempted espionage, saying he communicated and transmitted national defense information to someone he believed was a foreign intelligence agent.
According to the charges, 22-year-old Spc. William Colton Millay of Owensboro, Ky., intended to aid a foreign nation.
“Millay had access to the information through the course of his normal duties both stateside and on a previous deployment, and although the information was unclassified, Millay believed that it could be used to the advantage of a foreign nation,” according to a description of the charges released by Army officials.
Officials would not identify the country Millay believed the so-called agent represented or if their investigation involved a sting operation. Millay was assigned to a combat tour in Iraq from December 2009 to July 2010, and he served in Korea, according to information provided by the Army.
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(CNN) — The attorney representing the 22-year-old Kentucky soldier charged with attempted espionage and communicating military information said Tuesday that his client told him he is innocent.
“Generally speaking, yes — that he is not guilty of attempted espionage or spying against the United States,” Stephen Karns said of what the solider told him.
Spc. William Colton Millay of Owensboro, Kentucky, was charged this week with attempted espionage and communicating military information, allegations that have shocked friends who have described him as a patriotic country boy.
The formal charges were issued 10 days after Millay was arrested at Joint Base Elmendorf-Richardson, Alaska, said Col. Bill Coppernoll, the public affairs officer at the base.
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