On 5 August 2003, International Estate Agent John Lamberton was arrested in his office near Alicante, Spain, by three plain-clothed Spanish National Police Officers. He was arrested and detained on the basis of an International Arrest Warrant which had been issued by the Scottish Police some 5 months earlier. It has now been discovered that this arrest warrant issued by Lothian and Borders Police on behalf of the Scottish Crown Office was in fact incompetent and illegal.
John Lamberton was completely unaware of the proceedings being raised against him by the Scottish Crown Office and the Scottish Justice Department in Edinburgh. Nobody bothered to tell him! Police were never tasked with investigating any aspect of the allegations but were ultimately used to secure his arrest abroad. The police were effectively lied to by the Inland Revenue and the Crown Office as to John's status.
Inland Revenue investigators led by Stephen James Henderson acquired John's contact details but conveniently failed to pursue them choosing instead to invent a malicious allegation to the effect that John was an absconder abroad and effectively a fugitive. The Scottish Prosecutor and Procurator Fiscal Depute, Mrs Joan Guy, responsible for bringing the case against John Lamberton was later to inadvertently reveal in front of witnesses that she had raised the case, "as a favour to the Inland Revenue". Henderson aided and abetted by Guy had taken advantage of John's absence from the United Kingdom to instigate the malicious charges against him. The Scottish Crown Office thereafter manufactured an allegation of embezzlement in order to give support to the Inland Revenue's lesser allegation.
It has now been established that the case against John was driven by the need to set legal precedent with respect to Inheritance Tax. The decision to bring the prosecution was made at the highest level within the Inland Revenue in England as revealed by the minutes from a House of Commons Committee of Public Accounts Report dated 12 July 2005.