Jonathan Rees

Jonathan Rees is a private investigator, and former partner of Daniel Morgan.

Born September 1954 in Doncaster, Yorkshire, left school and joined the Merchant Navy, then became an investigator. In 1984, with partner Daniel Morgan, he set up a detective agency, Southern Investigations, in Thornton Heath, Surrey.

In April 1987, Rees was arrested on suspicion of the murder of Daniel Morgan but was released without charge.

Between Morgan's death in 1987 and 2008, five police inquiries were conducted. There were allegations of police corruption, drug trafficking and robbery.

After an inquiry by Hampshire police in 1988, Jonathan Rees and another man were charged with murder, but the case did not reach trial when charges were dropped because of a lack of evidence. and the Hampshire inquiry's 1989 report to the Police Complaints Authority found "no evidence whatsoever of police involvement in the murder".

In 1998, Metropolitan Police Deputy Assistant Commissioner Roy Clark conducted a third, secret, inquiry into the murder during which Southern Investigations’ office was bugged. In December 2000, Jonathan Rees was found guilty of conspiring to plant cocaine on an innocent woman in order to discredit her in a child custody battle and sentenced to seven years imprisonment for attempting to pervert the course of justice.

After the Metropolitan Police Commissioner Sir Ian Blair declared that the first police inquiry - that had included Detective Sergeant Sid Fillery, stationed at Catford police station - was "compromised", a secret fifth inquiry, began. Later, police arrested Jonathan Rees and several other on suspicion of murder, along with a serving police officer suspected of leaking information.

In 2009 the trial began at the Old Bailey. In March 2011 the Director of Public Prosecutions abandoned the case and three accused were acquitted, including Jonathan Rees.

The case involved some of the longest legal argument submitted in a trial in the English criminal courts. Nicholas Hilliard QC, for the prosecution, said that defence lawyers might not be able to examine all the documents in the case (750,000 pages dating back over 24 years) in order to ensure a fair trial.

After the collapse of the Old Bailey trial in March 2011 it was revealed that Jonathan Rees had earned £150,000 a year from the News of the World for supplying illegally obtained information about people in the public eye.

...
Wikipedia