‘The National Crime Agency’s Investigations Boss Was Sacked Over Leaks – Casting Doubt on Hundreds of Convictions’

The National Crime Agency dismissed its director of investigations, Nikki Holland, in December.

The NCA’s statement to the public was distinctly short: its one-time top crime fighter lost her job after making “information security breaches”. But a disciplinary panel found “no malign intent” and the agency “expects the highest standards of conduct from all officers”.

It has since emerged that Holland committed two instances of gross misconduct and two of misconduct, including using her private WhatsApp and email accounts to send security-classified information on her personal mobile phone. She also tried to declassify the contents of the email, so it could be sent to a non-secure source.

The Crown Prosecution Service disclosed these disciplinary findings during legal proceedings involving the covert accessing by the authorities of the encrypted phone network, Encrochat.

The information was not previously in the public domain, as – unlike officers at England and Wales’ 43 police forces – National Crime Agency employees are subject to closed disciplinary proceedings. 

A panel dismissed a total of 12 allegations against Holland including those relating to access to NCA material and its secure handling, storage and transmission.

The Independent Office for Police Conduct is currently investigating separate allegations that Holland and a junior colleague made data protection breaches, bullied colleagues and misused public funds, the CPS disclosure also revealed.

The disclosure offered a rare glimpse into the NCA’s culture, which – akin to many of England and Wales’ police forces – was deemed problematic by His Majesty’s Inspectorate of Constabulary and Fire & Rescue Services in a June 2023 review. 

Inspectors found “poor leadership” and “prejudicial and improper behaviour” across the agency’s satellite sites. They pointed to inconsistent decision-making in misconduct cases with officers who had acted dishonestly or engaged in sexual harassment keeping their highly-trusted jobs.

Officials’ responses to the misconduct allegations raise difficult questions about British law enforcement culture at a time when HMICFRS boss Andy Cook says that “trust in policing is hanging on by a thread” and “below 50%”.

Not dissimilar to former Prime Minister Boris Johnson who told the Covid Inquiry he had mysteriously lost 5,000 messages, Nikki Holland admitted deleting crucial evidence – including all of her WhatsApp messages – from her personal phone in February 2023, despite knowing that it was required for a misconduct investigation.

She acknowledged wrongly telling investigators that she hadn’t accessed a WhatsApp group from her personal device. 

The panel didn’t deem this as misconduct, as it found no evidence that she did these things to avoid incrimination.

In the absence of tangible evidence to the contrary, the public is forced to accept that she progressed to a top policing role without a basic awareness of the need to retain evidence.

It is notable that the High Court ruled in the ‘Wagatha Christie’ case that Rebekah Vardy’s agent didn’t mistakenly drop an iPhone of evidence into the North Sea. Yet the Covid Inquiry and police misconduct panels appear honour bound to accept that a growing number of civil servants are mistakenly disposing of evidence at the very time their actions are under scrutiny and careers are at stake.

The NCA is still “deciding whether to investigate” senior NCA officer Trudi Abadi’s allegation that Holland instructed staff to switch on WhatsApp’s disappearing messages function immediately after a judge ruled that officers’ messages must be disclosed to the court. This claim dates back to a Liverpool Crown Court preparatory hearing on 16 November 2020, but if proven, it would show a willingness to conceal evidence.

It is tempting to turn a blind eye to the latest official embroiled in a messaging fiasco in the era of ‘Government by WhatsApp’. However, Holland’s gross misconduct serves as a reminder that poor behaviour is far from limited to a rank-and-file drawn from the wider British public: it pervades the sector from top to bottom.

As an NCA director, she set the culture for an influential government agency that isn’t scrutinised like police forces. It is even exempt from the Freedom of Information Act. She played a key role in modelling acceptable attitudes and behaviours for more than 5,000 NCA employees and more than 234,000 police officers.

Holland managed Britain’s most serious criminal investigations, typically involving allegations of drugs and firearms importation, county lines and human trafficking. In 2020, she oversaw the secretive Operation Venetic, whereby authorities covertly accessed the encrypted phone network, Encrochat.

The NCA obtained more than 100 million messages – exposing corrupt police officers paid by organised crime groups, murder conspiracies and a vast illegal trade in drugs and firearms.

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The Encrochat Cases

The Encrochat cases are very unusual because hundreds of people have been convicted and sentenced to decades in prison without seeing any physical evidence whatsoever of their alleged criminality. 

The defendants have been convicted based on nothing more than cell site data (approximate phone location), a single CSV file and a promise – from Holland and her former team at the NCA – that the text within it corresponds to encrypted text messages. 

Typically, defendants have the opportunity to appoint an independent expert to test the accuracy of any evidence against them. However, the NCA steadfastly refuses to divulge the hacking method, claiming it is a French “defence secret”.

In many cases, police found no corresponding incriminating material such as drugs; firearms; cash or Encrochat devices. They were often unable to obtain surveillance or automatic number plate recognition and CCTV evidence to support their allegations of criminal activity.

Unsurprisingly, hundreds of defendants deny ever possessing an EncroChat device, while others are adamant that they supplied much lower quantities or different substances than alleged. They say that the NCA’s claims that there is not one mistake – across the decryption, analysis and presentation of 100 million encrypted messages – are absurd and risk significant miscarriages of justice.

There has rightly been a significant public backlash around the Horizon Post Office scandal, which saw more than 900 subpostmasters prosecuted for theft, false accounting and fraud – because faulty Horizon accounting software wrongly highlighted ‘missing’ cash. The inquiry into these miscarriages of justice shows that investigators made it impossible for independent IT experts to double-check the functioning of this software.

Many IT experts believe these wrongful convictions occurred because courts in England and Wales are entitled to assume that evidence from a computer is always right – unless defendants can prove it is inaccurate. Yet this controversial legislation is still in existence.

With no access to law enforcement’s hacking method, there is no opportunity for Encrochat defendants to prove even a single mistake.

It has taken more than a decade for middle-class sub-postmasters to obtain any semblance of justice. It feels unlikely that defendants accused of serious offences such as drug trafficking and murder will attract the same public furore.

Defence lawyers repeatedly accuse the NCA of failing to disclose critical information in the Encrochat proceedings, with some arguing that courts should stay the proceedings as defendants cannot receive a fair trial. Several legal profe