Burned
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Forwarding the July 2015 submission to Richard was not the first time that Andrew Crawford had passed confidential RHI documentation to his cousin. Two years earlier, the spad – at that point working in DETI with Foster – had done something almost identical. On a Saturday afternoon in July 2013 – just over eight months into the scheme – the DUP man forwarded to his cousin a confidential ministerial submission containing the consultation document for phase 2 of the RHI scheme. There was one striking similarity between the documents: they both contained implicit, but fairly obvious, warnings that the subsidy might be cut. The consultation document contained the proposed cost-control mechanism. Although it was subsequently abandoned by DETI, that was not known at the time. By passing the submission to his cousin, Richard had a 16-day advantage over ordinary members of the public, and had there been any sudden move to control the scheme he had been given longer to decide to get on board.
Although Andrew Crawford accepted at the inquiry that he should not have sent either of the confidential documents to his relative, he denied that there had been any benefit to him. He said: ‘If I was going out to advantage my cousin – which I wasn’t – he’d have installed a biomass boiler two years before that.’ The spad told the inquiry that he had been selling cattle for his father at the local livestock market in July 2013 when he had met his cousin. On being told that he was constructing new poultry houses, he said: ‘I suspect the debate came up about why he didn’t put in a biomass boiler … the scheme was undersubscribed and we were encouraging more people into the scheme.’ Crawford said that he thought his cousin had asked for information about RHI and because the submission was fresh in his memory he had sent that to him. The inquiry pressed him on why he would have sent a ministerial submission – written in the slightly peculiar language of bureaucracy – to his farmer cousin, rather than simply sending him a link to the public page on DETI’s website, which was marketing the scheme to the public. Crawford accepted that at the time he knew that what he was sending was a confidential government document but that he ‘couldn’t answer why my conscience didn’t stop me doing it; I just can’t answer that here today … I shouldn’t have sent it through to him. I want to apologise for it. It was wrong’.
Richard installed his first boilers in April 2014. In this period, his powerful Stormont cousin was taking a keen interest in RHI and would continue to do so. Andrew Crawford initially told the inquiry that he did not know at the time that Richard had installed the boilers, but then immediately corrected himself to say: ‘I’m not sure when I would’ve first seen that unit, er, in terms of being heated with biomass’. Just two months later, his brother James got a quote for biomass boilers. After returning to Northern Ireland from India, he had bought a field beside land owned by Andrew Crawford on which to build a poultry unit. The 6 June 2014 quote which James received included two graphs, one for ‘RHI income’ and the other for ‘cumulative savings per annum’, which communicated starkly how lucrative RHI would be for him. It told him that the system would have paid for itself before the end of the third year – with 17 more years of huge payments to come.
The farmer was told that he would see savings of more than £300,000 and then an RHI income of £250,000. On the face of it, it was a fairly astounding proposition. James’s brother was the spad who had helped design the scheme and who was in the department running it. It might have seemed obvious to at least ask him if the figures were credible or should be treated with caution. The two men certainly were not in any way estranged. Most weekends and during the holidays, Crawford would return from Belfast and stay at the family home – under the same roof as James. When Andrew Crawford was asked at the inquiry if he had any discussion with his brother about these sorts of documents, the DUP man began a lengthy answer that did not address the question. When pulled back to the question, he eventually said: ‘I do not recall any discussions, certainly at this time, about this.’ But when pressed further he firmed up that ‘I do not recall’ to an outright denial. Barrister Joseph Aiken asked him: ‘How likely is it that you, his brother and the special adviser to the minister who brought the scheme in that he’s thinking of participating in, didn’t put this document in front of your nose to say, “Andrew, surely that can’t be right”?’ The former spad replied: ‘Well, I’m very clear that he didn’t put it in front of my nose. I had no discussion with him about this document; I’ve no recollection of seeing this document ever before.’ Later, he said clearly: ‘No, I didn’t see the document.’ But then he again changed his answer, correcting himself to say: ‘Sorry, I’ve no recollection of seeing it.’
There was another member of the Crawford family who was to benefit from their spad relative’s inside track on Stormont’s plans. Andrew Crawford discussed the 8 July submission to Bell with his brother-in-law, Wallace Gregg, and then forwarded the submission to him. Crawford knew that Gregg was considering installing biomass boilers at that point but he would ultimately decide against doing so. No email was produced at the public inquiry to show that Crawford forwarded the 8 July submission to his brother James. However, given the pattern with other relatives, he was asked by Aiken: ‘Is the reason there’s no email … because you just told him? Why would you send it on to your cousin and not tell your brother?’ Crawford replied: ‘I’d no reason to send it to my brother, because I knew that it would be in place, you know. Did we have a discussion? I don’t know whether we’d a discussion about it or not.’ Aiken then asked: ‘Would it not seem to you highly odd if you sent a government submission, knowing you shouldn’t, to your cousin, who’s interested in the content, you think – he says he didn’t read it – and you wouldn’t tell your brother, the same information, who’s doing the exact same thing as your cousin?’ Crawford replied somewhat uncertainly: ‘I had, I suppose; there was no motivation to send it to my brother. Um, in terms; he had new installations just going in from the start. There was no issue in terms of getting them in before any deadline that was proposed.’ James – who the Crawfords said installed his boilers in July – would ultimately get two boilers accredited on the scheme before the cut in tariffs.
There was one more family member to benefit from RHI. On 16 and 17 November 2015, the last two days when the lucrative and uncapped ‘burn to earn’ tariff was available, John Crawford of Augher applied for three 99 kW RHI boilers to be accredited on the RHI. By the time RHI had been reined in – after what others alleged was Andrew Crawford’s attempts to delay that happening, something he denied – his relatives had 11 RHI boilers between them. There has never been any suggestion that any of the Crawfords were fraudulently claiming or exploiting RHI. However, given that as poultry farmers they had a high heat demand, it was enormously beneficial to them. Assuming a 50% load factor common for poultry units – and much less than some poultry farmers were claiming for – the 11 boilers could have been expected to pull in more than £6 million between them. Under prolonged and deeply sceptical questioning at the inquiry, Crawford repeatedly insisted that he had not been aware from his family of how lucrative RHI was and denied that the information he had sent his relatives had been financially beneficial to them.
In early 2017, the inquiry had written to Crawford and asked him to state any times where he was aware that anyone involved in RHI – including himself – had broken rules ‘including, but not limited to, by means of making premature or unauthorised disclosures’ or ‘acted in … any way where they had a real or perceived conflict of interest’. He replied to that question by saying: ‘I am not aware of any instances.’ When Crawford appeared before the inquiry, Aiken told him that the inquiry had obtained a witness statement from Richard Crawford in which he disclosed the July 2013 email Andrew Crawford had forwarded the ministerial submission. When asked why he had not initially disclosed to the inquiry the existence of the communication with his cousin, Andrew Crawford said:
Because when I done [sic] my first statement to the inquiry, in it I said that I didn’t have access to my government account and thi
s email came from my government account and I had no recollection of sending this email until I seen [sic] it coming back through in terms of the documentation that was produced from the inquiry.
That was not the only instance where the former spad did not immediately make the inquiry aware of information, which was important to its work but highly embarrassing for him.
The inquiry was suspicious about some of Crawford’s responses to its requests for documentation. As with all witnesses, Crawford had in early 2017 been served with the first of several formal notices issued under Section 21 of the Inquiries Act, which compelled him to produce all documentation relevant to the inquiry’s work.
But in September 2017 the inquiry wrote a stern letter to Crawford after it had found an email from him to his friend Mark Anderson in November 2016. The letter from inquiry solicitor Patrick Butler said that it seemed that the email was relevant to the inquiry’s work, had not been disclosed by Crawford and added: ‘At the moment, it appears to the inquiry that there has been a prima facie breach of the requirements of [the order for disclosure].’ Crawford told the inquiry that he had ‘no recollection’ of the email to Anderson and said ‘it is apparent to me that this email must have been deleted as it did not appear when I performed a search of my emails’. That was the second time that the inquiry had to write to Crawford. Four months earlier, as the inquiry was in its infancy, it had similarly written to Crawford’s solicitor ‘expressing concern about compliance with section 21 notices requiring the provision of documentation’, in particular text messages. Crawford had responded to that by saying that he would only have used his departmental BlackBerry device for text messages about RHI, and it was now in the custody of the department. However, the inquiry then became aware – based on text messages disclosed by other individuals – that Crawford had been using a personal mobile phone to conduct text communications about RHI. In response, Crawford told the inquiry that some text messages may have been deleted but he had found 12 relevant messages ‘of which I had no recollection’ and belatedly submitted them.
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But it wasn’t just his own family who Crawford put first: it was also that of his party leader, Peter Robinson. When the former spad appeared before the inquiry in April 2018 and was asked about leaking confidential government documents to his relatives, he insisted that his actions had been a thoughtless one-off. Speaking slowly and gravely, Aiken asked him: ‘Were you in the habit – and I want you to be very careful and think through what I’m asking you before you answer it – of sending material that you received in the course of your role as special adviser to people outside, whether that be family, friends, anyone else, but outside of the government service?’ Crawford replied firmly: ‘No, I wasn’t. Was I in the habit of leaking consultation documents? No, I wasn’t … I suspect because it was my cousin my guard was down.’ Aiken pressed the witness on whether – in light of his statement that he did not remember forwarding the document until it was brought to his attention – he had done so on other occasions but the inquiry had not uncovered it. Dr Crawford said: ‘I do not have any recollection; I do not believe that I sent any other communication out …’ Aiken said: ‘But, you understand, you didn’t remember any of these?’ Crawford replied: ‘Yes, but … I don’t want to say that it was widespread practice sending out documents; it was not widespread practice sending out documents.’
But that was far from the full story. When back before the inquiry the following month, Crawford admitted that forwarding confidential documents outside Stormont was not a one-off. The former spad was confronted with new evidence recovered from his old government email account, which showed that he had sent confidential information to Gareth Robinson, the lobbyist son of the then First Minister. Crawford admitted that the lobbyist had received preferential treatment because of who his father was. This time, Crawford’s intentions were fairly explicit – in a covering email to Robinson Jr, Crawford had made clear that the confidential information was for one of his major corporate clients. The material was particularly striking because of the suggestion that his requests on behalf of paying customers were treated uniquely because his father was the First Minister, a nepotistic approach to politics entirely contrary to the standards by which public officials are bound.
Robinson Jr had long attracted scrutiny not only from journalists and rivals of the DUP but from other Belfast lobbyists who wondered how he operated. A former DUP councillor, he ran Verbatim Communications, a company which only appeared to employ its owner and whose publicly declared accounts suggested it was a modest operation. He had threatened to sue the News Letter in 2015 – just a few months after Crawford was forwarding him information – when it revealed that he was working for two energy firms and asked whether he was lobbying a DUP department to pursue policies favourable to those firms. On 20 March 2015, Crawford forwarded an email to Gareth Robinson following a verbal discussion about two of his major renewable energy clients – Gaelectric and Lightsource.
Crawford said he met two senior figures from one of the companies as a result of Robinson Jr’s lobbying. The document attached to the email was a Whitehall consultation about UK-wide changes to the energy market and it was not due to be published for three more days, having been sent to Stormont in confidence. Robinson Jr asked in response to the document: ‘Is this for Richard or Patrick?’, a reference to Richard Green from Lightsource and Patrick McClughan from Gaelectric, to which Crawford replied: ‘It’s for Richard.’
Under questioning at the inquiry, Crawford said that he was concerned that ‘Northern Ireland companies may miss out’ on the consultation. However, company records show that although both companies were operating in Northern Ireland – and were major beneficiaries of the NIRO green electricity subsidy – Gaelectric was headquartered in Dublin and Lightsource was run from London.
More than a year earlier, Crawford had forwarded to Robinson Jr an email which had attached to it a privileged legal document related to the department’s judicial review of another Stormont department in relation to planning permission. Crawford told the inquiry:
I don’t have a clear recollection of the sequence of events but I suspect Gareth asked for – and why he asked for that information I can only assume; I don’t have 100% knowledge – but was wanting to know about the process in terms of the timelines for the legal case and what not and that is laid out in the body [of the email] …
It was put to Crawford that he could have forwarded the email but deleted the legally sensitive document attached. He accepted that but claimed he had been ‘clumsy’ in not doing so.
Crawford suggested he may have been asked to send the document by Peter Robinson – something he subsequently denied – and added: ‘I can’t recall the discussions that I had with Gareth on the particular issue. Obviously, Gareth was Peter’s son and because of that I tended to respond to his queries probably quicker than I may have responded to some other PR companies’ queries.’ The matter of fact tone in which Crawford gave his evidence of preferential treatment for Robinson Jr suggested that he did not think that it was at all remarkable.
DETI was not the only department being lobbied by Robinson Jr. Documents released under an environmental transparency law show that he contacted DUP minister Edwin Poots personally about a planning issue, rather than going through his department. Robinson Jr emailed Poots’s private email address. The correspondence was only held by the department and therefore within the knowledge of civil servants who released it because Poots forwarded it to his department.
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On the day of the 8 July submission to Jonathan Bell, and just over a week before Crawford passed it to his relatives, another issue was troubling senior DUP figures. That day a blog in which loyalist activist Jamie Bryson alleged DUP corruption around the NIRO energy subsidy was immediately brought to the attention of the then Finance Minister, Foster. Crawford, forwarded it to Foster that night and she quickly replied to say: ‘Th
at’s not good. Is TJ [top DUP spad Timothy Johnston] aware?’ Several DUP MLAs were unhappy over the proposal from Bell to soften the blow for some major green energy companies – at the expense of electricity consumers.
Inquiry barrister Donal Lunny said that Bryson’s blog was ‘to do with, I suppose, what he perceived to be some form of corruption in relation to two companies that were affected by changes to NIRO’. Lunny said that, as with RHI, ‘the NIRO involves very large amounts of money’. At the inquiry, chairman Sir Patrick Coghlin was intrigued at how the internet allegations from the young loyalist had gone straight to the top of the DUP – while Crawford said that he had never passed on to Foster much of what he knew about RHI in that period. Coghlin asked: ‘What is it about whoever Mr Bryson is … that [it] had to go to these dizzy levels of government?’ Coghlin’s bafflement at why Bryson’s blog went to the top of the party was understandable and, given the constant swirl of lurid internet allegations, it seemed strange that online claims would be taken seriously by senior DUP figures. However, there was a crucial political context.
The previous week independent TD Mick Wallace had used Dáil privilege to allege that major Belfast law firm Tughans had moved £7 million to an off-shore bank account on the Isle of Man after the biggest property sale in the history of the island of Ireland – the £1.3 billion sale the previous year of property loans held by the Republic of Ireland’s ‘bad bank’ NAMA. Wallace’s claim that the £7 million was ‘earmarked for a Northern Ireland politician’ led the news in Northern Ireland for days. The loans had been sold to US vulture fund Cerberus after a rival bidder pulled out when it realised that leading Belfast businessman Frank Cushnahan had been in line for a £5 million payment as part of the politically sensitive sale. Among Cushnahan’s powerful friends was Peter Robinson and on 6 July – two days before the NIRO blog – Bryson had alleged that some of the Isle of Man money was for Robinson. Later that year Bryson would make the allegation to a Stormont committee investigating the affair. Robinson has consistently dismissed the allegations and said that he did nothing wrong. But he was under enormous personal and political pressure in this period, particularly from within his own party. Some senior DUP figures who had long been unhappy either at his centralised style of leadership or the direction of the party saw a chance to further destabilise him. Just two days after tiering was finally introduced in the RHI scheme in November of that year and days after the Fresh Start Agreement with Sinn Féin, Robinson announced that he was stepping down as First Minister and DUP leader, saying that it was time to retire after ‘stabilising’ Stormont.