Walter Finch
A BRITISH accountant who is fighting extradition to Spain has fired his legal team after losing the hearing.
Paul Blanchard, 79, is now pinning his hopes on a panel of appeal judges overturning the decision with the help of a new barrister dubbed ‘the queen of extradition’ by the Times.
Karen Todner, who helped Pentagon hacker Gary McKinnon fend off extradition to the USA, will now take the reins in Blanchard’s efforts to prove he was working undercover for Spanish intelligence at the time of his supposed crimes.
“I was dissatisfied with my original legal team,” Blanchard told the Olive Press.
“They failed to put matters before the court despite my precise legal instructions.”
Spain is trying to bring home their ‘former man’ and put him on trial for the crimes he supposedly investigated for them.
They read like a long-running spy novel series, each book more implausible than the one before.
But for the former accountant, a lot depends on him convincing a panel of British appeals judges that it is certainly no fiction.
Spanish prosecutors accuse him of being the chief architect behind a globe-spanning money laundering scheme run by mafia figures in Tenerife.
Yet the Yorkshireman claims that he was actually an undercover agent for Spanish intelligence, codenamed Isabella.
He spied for them on terrorists and organised gangsters at the turn of the millennium – until his handlers ‘threw him under the bus’.
What is not in doubt, however, is that Blanchard became the number cruncher for the ‘godfather of Tenerife’, Mohamed Derbah, in 1999.
Derbah was in turn the right-hand man to John ‘Goldfinger’ Palmer, who smelted the gold from the infamous Brink’s-Mat gold heist at Heathrow Airport in 1983 (recently turned into a BBC drama called The Gold).
And later on – at the behest of Spanish intelligence officers, Blanchard insists – he even met face-to-face with the leaders of grisly terror groups including Al Qaeda and the IRA.
What lies ahead for the offshore specialist, if his appeal is unsuccessful, is a possible showpiece trial in Madrid, where Spain’s justice system will try to disavow that any of this was ever done at their behest.
