The short story of anti-corruption safeguards of the UK law enforcement is that they are dead.

As it has been a long time since I posted in this blog, I see it beneficial, if not required, to give some update and elaborate the point above. As of now, most of the judicial reviews initiated by me, have been finalized: they all have been refused, up to the final instance.

At the root of my claims, all I have asked about was the ability to deal with the police officers who have not committed against me criminal offences or (as my complaints against Merseyside Police are still being ‘investigated’ by itself, for the 4^th year in a row) about whom it cannot be reasonably concerned that, they have done so. The courts have ruled that I ask for too much and that police powers can be exercised in the UK with the potential bias and there is nothing wrong with that. This curious proposition appears now to have the power of law in the UK, given that it has been stated by the Court of Appeal in its recent decision. The decision must be read in the context of my appeal grounds considered but failed to be comprehended by the court. I leave it here in public to cement the current level of the UK standards of police’s work as of 2023. I was very surprised to hear from a court that police can act with bias, despite the Supreme Court having outlined the importance of appearance of impartiality in the work of police. But the Court of Appeal has said so in my claims (and I cannot appeal to the Supreme Court). So this is the UK standard now then. So be it.

One can be a businessman with certain skills and ability to dedicate resources (as am I). One can spend 5 years to pursue justice and bring corrupt police officers to it (as did I). One can start 25 JRs about the lamentable (not my words, but of ex-High Court judge Sir Richard Henriques) and failing system of anti-corruption safeguards (as did I). One can file 20 appeals over each of the refused JR claims (which is more than 2% of the civil appeals considered by the Court of Appeal annually). One can possess the ability to meaningfully engage with the courts and produce many hundreds of pages of legal submissions for two dozen litigation strands in parallel (as did I). One can stand alone against 5 barristers and 3 solicitors at once, without any legal support (as got to do I on one of the High Court hearings). One can address by detailed complaints conduct of 28 public servants within a provincial police force and the IOPC itself (as did I). It does not matter what one can; it matters what this system can – NOTHING. It’s dead, non-operative.

A beautiful and well-thought system of statutory safeguards of anti-corruption (as the UK appears to possess ‘on papers’ and in theory) is being exercised by people who have neither competence nor intelligence to have a clear idea what they are supposed to do – I am speaking about the IOPC here. With such a ‘watchdog’, there is little wonder in that corrupt conduct and the infamous ‘blue code’ of double standards with rotten integrity thrive and bloom within a provincial police force like Merseyside Police: in this system nothing means anything and one can spend 5 years without any result to explain that police officers could not, acting in good faith, come to a Magistrates’ court and portray to it an international businessman, whose company sponsored Liverpool FC for the 4^th year in a row right at the time, as a person who had sold an airplane ticket to Nigeria for £750 in a low-level online scam. The basic cognitive functioning in a stable mode (rather than occasional and largely reluctant to deal with evidence) in this system is lacking, as a matter of medical fact. They will be reading the same allegations (70 individual examples of misleading the courts, each as apparent as the one above) for years and, without blinking an eye, saying they are not sure yet and that they are confused. Surely, inability to do basic cognitive analysis is making life very confusing and clouded. One millimeter away form a standard situation (albeit I hardly imagine that misleading the courts is not the one for Merseyside Police) and the work of the safeguards becomes virtually mentally impaired: throughout the 5 years of this hell, I sometimes felt like I was really speaking with people, for whom basic logic is something akin to quantum physics, i.e. they know it exists but not much more than that. Applying it in their work on a sensible level is for them like building a space rocket: unimaginable.

I believe it is safe to say that no person ever in the history of this country has applied such a big effort to make anti-corruption safeguards finally work as did I; I am similarly positive that no one ever will do as much after me.

If, even with my efforts, significant financial legal expenses and suffered damages (which I undertook consciously as a price of pursuing justice), almost 5 years of time spent on making this system of anti-corruption safeguards finally do the job, nothing has worked, what then can work, let alone for people who are less prepared and equipped to stand for their rights than was I? That is a rhetoric question: the way it is, this system is non-operative and unprepared for handling serious matters of corruption conventionally in any realistic way.

They just imitate the existence of safeguards but, in reality, all they do is to brush, brush and brush under the carpet anything that falls outside of their (very limited) understanding and ability to comprehend. May be the dishonest individuals serving within police will get old, retire and new, better ones will come by themselves? With the current level of competence, probably that is the only realistic way how this system can expect to get better. Because nothing works when it comes to a critical case with serious questions about systemically corrupt conduct and systemic and blatant cover-up of it within a modern UK police force – Merseyside Police.

Indeed, the person who has repeatedly turned a blind eye on evidence of serious corruption – Mr Andrew Cooke, ex-Chief Constable of Merseyside Police, has become the Chief Inspector of HMICFRS and ‘oversees’ the ‘integrity’ of policing in the UK, nationwide. This system deserves such a gatekeeper of integrity, my complaints against whom were simply flushed into a toilet bowl by his close ally ex-Police and Crime Commissioner Jane Kennedy back in 2020. She was allowed by the IOPC to ‘investigate’ him on my allegations of enabling serious corruption despite the legislation at the time already prohibiting such apparent conflict of interest for PCC’s by virtue of the freshest Police Regulations of 2020.

In the US, when police is suspected to be engaged in serious corruption, they are investigated by the FBI, which, among other things, is known to have own academy. In the UK, police corruption safeguards are managed by people hired from the street (and they were controlled and directed by an ex-accountant Mr Michael Lockwood), whose agreement with the salary appears to be the main criteria of being hired and who, having received inadequate training, get on critical roles:

‘The ‘lead investigator’ [of the IOPC] readily conceded her lack of relevant education, training and experience.’

(Sir Richard Henriques’ comments  on the IOPC’s work in 2019)

In my case I could not get even that: the IOPC has just allowed the provincial crooks (Merseyside Police) to investigate themselves without the IOPC’s involvement.

My diagnose for the UK system of safeguards against police corruption, which I have no hesitation to pronounce after having spent almost 5 years of my life and incredible resources and efforts on invoking it: a futile decoration.

Whether accidental to the true quality of the IOPC’s work or not, the person who has built this system and occupied the IOPC’s head role since its inception in 2018 (Mr Lockwood, pictured above) is now a subject of a police investigation himself. I wish him to enjoy the standards of police work he has caused to exist throughout almost 5 years of his oversight of the failed child of the UK system called the IOPC. One should not worry – his colleague, Chief Inspector of HMICFRS Mr Cooke will continue maintaining similar standards of the UK policing (like the ones cited below) he taught earlier everyone during his tenure of Chief Constable of Merseyside Police up to 12 April 2021, whilst silently endorsing serious corruption alleged by my complaints, evidence of which was repeatedly supplied to him.

“And I certainly fully support police officers using their discretion [to turn a blind eye on certain crimes]” – Source

“If everybody sticks solidly to a policy, particularly in policing, you’d never get any individual thought. Everybody would just follow things straight by the rules. [Which is bad]” – Source

(Mr Andrew Cooke, the Chief Inspector of HMICFRS and a prominent think tank of the modern standards of the UK policing)

If ever you suffer from any misconduct of the UK police – at least in the case of Merseyside Police – please know: they will do whatever they want and no one cares because any complaints will be ‘investigated’ by themselves (with an ‘oversight’ of the systemically incompetent IOPC) and the only case where you can get any result is if the officer you messed up with is stupid enough to be ostracized by his colleagues and does not possess minuscule connections. Only in that case he or she can become one of those they proudly punish in public eyes, as their sacrifice to maintain the decorative and misleading picture of actually operating anti-corruption safeguards.

As long as you mess with someone like Detective Inspector Bylinski-Gelder and his crooked superiors (as did I), be sure: they will ‘investigate’ themselves for many years to come (so as to wear down your desire of justice) and, time and again, find nothing wrong in whatever you are concerned of, even if you allege clear and undefendable misconduct, including the criminal one (as is the serial misleading of the courts performed by DI Bylinski-Gelder’s gang in my case). You, of course, will be able to appeal to the IOPC but that will be changing for you one systemic issue – corruption in a provincial police force like Merseyside Police – to another one, such as the systemic incompetence of the IOPC. I have appealed the refusal of my complaints to the IOPC and got my appeals upheld twice and – surprise, surprise – in both cases the genius IOPC allowed the re-investigation of my complaints to be returned to the crooks themselves (who now ‘investigate’ themselves for the third time in a row): may be from the third attempt they will discover they are crooks? If not, no worries – there may be fourth, fifth and sixth times – as many as needed. This ‘watchdog’ only ‘watches’ as that is the only function they were taught, despite wide powers to direct the investigation of the complaints to be handled by another force or – as was inevitable from my appeals – to direct gross misconduct proceedings. This complaint system’s circus continues for me since July 2018 and all I see is that the officers, whom I have complained of to have mixed themselves up in serious corruption, get promotions. And I don’t wonder why: this system’s evolution has turned into reversal. With the blind UK media ignoring my case for years (except where my crooky opponents invite its attention on their own when it pleases them) that is of no surprise. Ex-Chief Constable of the systemically corrupt Merseyside Police becoming the Chief Inspector of HMICFRS is a monument of that reverse evolution. It cannot be more self-speaking.

On the other hand, the IOPC has invoked an unlawful Policy  which immunizes its staff from complaints, however egregious and bizarre are the decisions they make. No other public body in the UK appears to have such invention. Yet, the so called ‘guards of the guards’ (the IOPC) have made this wishful (however unlawful) gift to themselves. That has been another strand of my litigation (for the unknown reasons ludicrously portrayed by Liverpool Echo to be a “money laundering battle”). It has been recently, quite curiously, rejected by the Court of Appeal as well: it follows, the public bodies can immunize their staff by simply issuing a policy that they are not accountable for the decisions they make (despite Nolan’s Principle #4). It is of no surprise that the same approach is then projected by the IOPC to the Professional Standards Department (PSD) of Merseyside Police, ‘overseen’ by the IOPC: however bizarre are PSD’s decisions on my complaints against corrupt conduct of the officers back in 2018 and 2019 time and again, the complaints about that clearly sham exercise of the duty to investigate corruption for years in a row are refused by the IOPC on the ground that an appeal (against the complaint’s outcome) is available. It may be available but the lack of personal accountability for the absolutely bizarre decisions means that those at PSD producing them have carte blanche for an endless sham process where the addressing of the complaints is blatantly imitated for many years by the same people, as an instrument of virtual immunity for the corrupt officers that are covered up by them. In my case, PSD of Merseyside Police have accepted the complaint against the officers who have misled the court back in 2018, they ‘investigate’ it for years but, time and again, are very confused and cannot see serious corruption from undefendable evidence of serial misleading the courts. With that warm and sincere support in the background, the dishonest police officers are pursuing for the 6th year in a row their malicious vendetta against me (the so called ‘investigation’) aimed to shift the agenda from their own criminal conduct and to discredit me as the complainant of that misconduct.

Unless something significant changes, this system will likely fail and, probably, it deserves it.

Update: on 1 March 2023 (9 days after this post), the IOPC has become a subject of the third in a row review by the Home Office. Two previous reviews initiated in 2019 and 2021 went with no result. Anecdotally, the review’s purpose mentions checking “accountability”, from which the IOPC has immunized its staff by its own Policy referred to above. It begs the question how many reviews of ‘accountability’ of the IOPC’s work are required to notice an elephant in the room.

Two exceptions in the kingdom of lamentable safeguards against police corruption

Having said all the above, I want to write shortly about two things which have been the only rays of cognitive functioning in this self-confused and cloudy-minded wholesale-failing system of law enforcement safeguards of the UK.

One is the CPS and another one is the NCA. Despite their being unlikely candidates for friends for a businessman born in Russia (I am a Tatar, not a Russian, for the record once again), I have found those two bodies being the only ones who understand what the public interest and the law are. Both have repeatedly refused to assist my crooky opponents within Merseyside Police since as early as 2017 (even before I learned about the so called ‘investigation’ started by them with false pretenses from onset).

What analytical conclusion can be put here? Just like the much more famous standard of quality – the FBI – the NCA and the CPS are elite bodies with proper vetting systems of staff. Police, whose employment systems are much akin to the one exercised by the IOPC (virtually, random people from the street, whoever agrees with the salary), have a similar to the IOPC’s result: if one employs random people with little vetting and the lacking corporate culture of high standards (not those decoratively advertised for the public but the real ones, applicable in real practice, with what there are very serious issues in, at the least, Merseyside Police), one will get something that is not difficult to predict – a mess. That mess’s being empowered to exercise significant police powers can have dramatic turns for individuals and, I am very confident, does so not only in my case.

It is frustrating to deal with incompetent people, it is even more frustrating to observe the significant police powers applied against one’s life by the dishonest individuals whose own conduct and thinking are criminal, and I am glad and thankful that, in this kingdom of lamentable safeguards at least something has worked for me. That is the only positive thing I can say about this system, highlighting that, despite the CPS being, clearly, an actually operating safeguard, the police have virtually unlimited power and discretion to harass one’s life as long as they want, by their ‘investigation’ and the status of ‘suspect’, which is what the crooks at Merseyside Police do for the 6^th year in a row as a leverage against my complaints of their own criminal conduct  when applying for the AFO application in April 2018.

Almost 5 years of fighting, 25 JRs about basic principles of policing (integrity, impartiality) and the public service (accountability), 20 JR appeals over the same, 28 complaints against two dozen civil servants, thousands of pages of legal submissions, appeals, complaints, letters. Nothing works in this system of safeguards, except the two bodies – the CPS and the NCA – who even were never tasked to act as anti-corruption bodies but nevertheless acted as safeguards of the Rule of Law, by their ability to do proper cognitive functioning and fulfilling their duties on a level one would expect from the modern UK.

Albeit they have not much to do with my complaints about police officers’ conduct, they have much to do with what the dishonest individuals in Merseyside Police were trying to pursue about me and, it is my clear understanding, they have repeatedly concluded what any non-prejudiced body would conclude – that it is wholesale rubbish. They did so every year since 2017, whilst DI Bylinsky-Gelder of Merseyside Police and his gang tried to manipulate other bodies, including internationally, maliciously using the good name of the UK police. I can only imagine how many international counter-parties they have misled as part of this circus, in which provincial crooks in UK police can portray an international investigation with serious faces.

In other words, whilst these two bodies have worked well, they, inherently, are not the safeguards of the police complaint’s system. That system, as I have explained above, is dead: with the ‘watchdog’ as the IOPC the police in the UK can do whatever they want, marinating complaints and imitating their processing for ages so as to facilitate the abuse of power by those they cover up internally. I, of course, have such facts only about Merseyside Police and can’t project it to other police forces, but the IOPC is a nationwide body and the state of this body is just what ex-High Court judge Sir Richard Henriques has said: ‘Lamentable. Inadequate. Inexcusable’.