National Crime Agency wins legal battle to keep hitting gangsters through EncroChat trap

Encrochat evidence helped convict Jamie 'Iceman' Stevenson who last month admitted masterminding a £76m plot to smuggle cocaine into Scotland via crates of bananas.

The National Crime Agency has defeated a legal challenge which threatened to undermine arrests made using evidence from the EncroChat messaging system.

The crime-fighting body had faced claims that they improperly obtained warrants to access data from the encrypted mobile phone network. The system, which was widely used by criminals to smuggle drugs and guns into and around the UK, was penetrated in 2020 and messages were intercepted and decoded.

The inquiry, called Operation Venetic, has seen several of Scotland's most senior organised crime figures convicted because of evidence from Encrochat. They include Jamie 'Iceman' Stevenson who last month admitted masterminding a £76million plot to smuggle nearly a ton of cocaine from South America to Scotland hidden in a cargo of bananas.

A lawsuit, brought on behalf of 11 people arrested as a result of Encrochat data, claimed NCA officers had misled the judge who granted the warrants. It claimed the NCA were wrong to say the Encrochat probe was a 'single investigation' rather than multiple ones and that the network had been used 'exclusively' for criminal purposes.

The claim was rejected by the Investigatory Powers Tribunal (IPT) last year and that decision has now been upheld by senior judges at the Court of Appeal in London. In a written ruling, Lord Justice Holroyde, sitting with Lord Justice Dingemans and Lady Justice Laing, said: "We do not consider that it is arguable the NCA had an improper purpose in seeking the authority of a warrant for the conduct described in the application for the warrant.

"The IPT had evidence, which it was entitled to accept, that the NCA's contemporaneous assessment was that EncroChat was exclusively, or almost exclusively, used for criminal purposes. There was, as we understand it, no evidence to suggest that it was not.

"There were a few cases in which there was not enough evidence to show what use was being made of the EncroChat handset in question, but no evidence of any use for purposes which were not criminal. The contrary is not arguable. Nor do we consider that it is arguable that the IPT erred in law in concluding that Operation Venetic was 'a single operation or investigation'."

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A ruling in favour of the claimants could have opened the floodgates to a wave of challenges to criminal proceedings brought using Encrochat evidence. Messages extracted from the EncroChat data showed Stevenson, using the handle Elusiveale, discussed the importation of kilo blocks of cocaine with his associates.

The 59-year-old, from Rutherglen, near Glasgow, is due to be sentenced next month. Others convicted using evidence from EncroChat include drug cartel boss James White, who is estimated to have made more than £126million from his life of crime.

White, 46, from Glasgow, was extradited from Brazil and jailed for almost 10 years in August last year. EncroChat - which had an estimated 9000 users in the UK - was cracked by a joint investigative team of French and Dutch law enforcement agencies.

The Scottish arm of Operation Venetic, which involved hundreds of police officers, saw a total of 59 people arrested.

Cocaine, heroin, cannabis, herbal cannabis and thousands of Etizolam tablets - also known as fake valium - were recovered, along with £7million of laundered cash and a number of firearms, ammunition, explosives and industrial pill presses. The NCA declined to comment on the case.

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