A critic of tax havens who featured in a BBC documentary concerning the Brink’s-Mat gold bullion theft was misrepresented, in accordance with Ofcom.
The Gold: Inside Story, which aired in March, traced how armed males broke into the Brink’s-Mat safety depot close to London’s Heathrow Airport in November 1983.
It additionally targeted on the place the lacking gold ended up and banking practices on the time.
In a report printed on Monday, media watchdog Ofcom stated it had upheld a criticism of “unjust or unfair therapy” from Arthur Lewis-Gray, who says he labored for offshore tax havens as a lawyer earlier than leaving and turning into essential of them.
Mr Lewis-Gray claimed within the Ofcom report that the documentary re-used footage of him “shorn of context” from an ITV World In Motion programme, broadcast within the Nineteen Eighties.
He stated the BBC programme made him appear like an “enthusiastic vendor” of offshore monetary companies within the Isle of Man, “whatever the final result”.
Mr Lewis-Gray added that he had “been moved from the world of tax avoidance and evasion to commenting apparently frivolously on critical and murderous crime”.
He stated he at the moment works in regulatory compliance for banks, and his look “runs opposite to (his) work in these organisations”.
Mr Lewis-Gray stated “various folks have since contacted (him) having considered the programme”.
The disposal of the Brink’s-Mat bullion, value £26 million, was among the many largest worldwide money-laundering operations of the time and left a string of killings in its wake.
A lot of the three tonnes of stolen gold has by no means been recovered and a number of the suspects weren’t convicted.
The BBC stated the footage was a small a part of a wider evaluation of the state of the tax avoidance trade within the Nineteen Eighties, and the way it facilitated the laundering of the proceeds of crimes.
The broadcaster additionally stated Mr Lewis-Gray’s contribution was “sufficiently transient” so viewers couldn’t assign him a motive or assume he was an “enthusiastic vendor” of offshore companies.
Nonetheless, the company agreed there ought to be “higher readability” and stated it has made “strenuous efforts to resolve the problem”, together with eradicating the clip from the BBC iPlayer model.
The BBC additionally stated it could not rebroadcast the present within the unique format or promote to different broadcasters with that phase.
Ofcom stated Mr Lewis-Gray was unnamed and “proven very briefly” so it could be “unlikely” that viewers would affiliate him specifically with commenting on the Brink’s-Mat theft.
Nonetheless, the published watchdog additionally stated that with out the context that he was a critic of tax havens, then viewers might need seen him as “advocating the advantages of offshore monetary companies”.
The watchdog stated: “Ofcom thought-about that the re-use of the interview footage of Mr Lewis-Gray within the BBC programme was not introduced in an applicable context, and that this resulted within the complainant being misrepresented in a means that had the potential to materially and adversely to have an effect on viewers’ opinions of him.
“Ofcom thought-about that this created unfairness to the complainant within the programme as broadcast.
“Ofcom has upheld Mr Lewis-Gray’s criticism of unjust or unfair therapy within the programme as broadcast.”
A BBC spokeswoman stated the company famous the findings of Ofcom and declined to remark additional.
The documentary accompanied a six-part sequence referred to as The Gold, starring Hugh Bonneville, Jack Lowden and Dominic Cooper, which started airing in February.
The sequence adopted the decades-long chain of occasions after what was described as “the crime of the century”.