Archer's fall: MEP urges fraud squad inquiry over Kurdish cash

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Archer faces inquiry over cash for Kurds

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Belmarsh prison: 1998 inspection report

Jeffrey Archer never tired of talking about money, how he was worth at least £60m, and how he had also raised millions for charity.

Indeed much of his wife Mary's time in the witness box at the Old Bailey was taken up with describing how generous the couple had been in response to "begging letters" after his £500,000 libel victory over the Daily Star.

In the aftermath of his conviction for perjury and forgery on Thursday, the focus has moved to Archer's finances in a way that he and his wife would find most unwelcome.

As well as a writ for £2.2m from the Daily Star, there is now the possibility of separate official inquiries into three highly self-publicised aspects of his colourful life.

Kurdish groups and the MEP Emma Nicholson, a former Tory party vice-chairman, are taking the first steps towards a fraud squad investigation into money which allegedly went missing from £57m raised for Iraqi Kurds. The Department of Trade and Industry is waiting for new developments to reopen the investigation into the Anglia shares scandal. The Inland Revenue is preparing to inquire into allegations that Archer organised movements of cash from Jersey to Britain.

In his life before Belmarsh, Archer, who moved in high Tory circles and was rich enough to hire the best lawyers in the land, had managed to survive all these problems. But now, with his humiliating fall, investigators in a number of government departments believe people with relevant information will be more willing to come forward.

The most forthright and public figure to do so has been Baroness Nicholson of Winterbourne, long involved in aid for people in Iraq. She says she is prepared to make a complaint to Scotland Yard about the Tory peer and the millions which went missing from the Simple Truth appeal for the 800,000 Kurds trapped in northern Iraq. She and Kurdish exiles claim that as little as £250,000 appears to have reached the suffering refugees from the £ 57m raised.

Any Inland Revenue inquiry will focus on claims made by Michael Stacpoole, a friend and factotum of Archer. Mr Stacpoole has described how he smuggled in wads of cash from Jersey at the instruction of Archer.

Mr Stacpoole said he would pick up the money from an offshore account in the island and bring it in hidden in pockets of his overcoat. Mr Stacpoole maintains that he was responsible for delivering between £7,000 and £ 15,000 a month to Archer, who boasted he had more than £1m there. Archer claimed the proceeds were from his best-selling books and he was not doing anything illegal.

However, an Inland Revenue official said last night: "Now that the perjury trial is over, and considering its outcome, there is absolutely no reason why an investigation should not take place. If that happens we shall obviously expect Mr Stacpoole's cooperation. After all he has gone public with his account."

In 1994 Neil Hamilton, the corporate affairs minister who was later disgraced in the cash for questions scandal, had recommended that Archer should not be prosecuted after an investigation into alleged insider dealing in shares of Anglia television.

Archer had bought 50,000 shares in the name of a Kurdish friend, Broosk Saib, in Anglia while a secret takeover bid was being made for the television company, where Mary Archer was a director. The address given for Mr Saib was Archer's own at Alembic House, on the Embankment in London. They were later sold for a profit of £77,219.

Although Archer was to claim that he had been totally exonerated by the DTI inquiry, all it did was decide there were insufficient grounds for prosecution as it could not be definitely proven that Lady Archer had passed on information to her husband.

But the DTI inspector, Hugh Aldous, said pointedly at the time: "It is an inspector's job to produce a report. If the DTI and its lawyers decide to let someone off, it is up to them."

After Archer's conviction, Neil Hamilton said on BBC's Panorama: "He is more a chump than a crook. The purpose of such a report is to determine whether there is a case for prosecution." A DTI spokesman said yesterday that an inquiry could be reopened if new evidence became available.

Lady Archer left the board of Anglia 18 months after the share scandal. The only thing she has said publicly matter about the matter is: "I haven't checked my diary, but I didn't tell my husband or anybody about the takeover of Anglia, full stop."