Mandelson,<\/a>\u00a0the documents suggest the veteran Labour Party politician may have shared an internal government report with Epstein and told the financier that he would lobby for a cut on tax on bankers\u2019 bonuses when he held the title of Business Secretary around 15 years ago.<\/p>\nBoth men previously denied wrongdoing and have not commented on the most recent allegations.<\/p>\n
A difficult offense to prove<\/p>\n
The Crown Prosecution Service \u2014 which conducts criminal investigations in England and Wales \u2014 defines misconduct in public office as \u201cserious willful abuse or neglect of the power or responsibilities of the public office held.\u201d There must be a direct link between the misconduct and an abuse of those responsibilities, it said.<\/p>\n
The offense carries a maximum sentence of life imprisonment.<\/p>\n
Prosecutors must investigate all the evidence gathered on the men to consider if it is enough to prove misconduct in each case.<\/p>\n
Experts say proving the offense, which can be traced back to medieval times, is notoriously difficult.<\/p>\n
There is no simple definition of what constitutes a \u201cpublic officer.\u201d It may be particularly difficult to prove Mountbatten-Windsor was the holder of a public office when he was the U.K.\u2019s special representative for international trade and investment \u2014 an unsalaried role with paid travel expenses.<\/p>\n
Prosecutors must next establish if the suspects willfully neglected to perform their duties or willfully committed misconduct.<\/p>\n
The neglect or misconduct must also be so serious that it amounts to an abuse of public trust.<\/p>\n
Finally, the actions must be deemed to be \u201cwithout reasonable excuse of justification,\u201d according to the prosecution service.<\/p>\n
\u2018The law is in need of reform\u2019<\/p>\n
The Law Commission, an independent legal body that makes reform recommendations to the government, says the wording of the offense is unhelpfully vague. The commission has called for years for it to be repealed and replaced by more specific offenses.<\/p>\n
\u201cThe law is in need of reform, in order to ensure that public officials are appropriately held to account for misconduct committed in connection with their official duties,\u201d the Law Commission said on its website.<\/p>\n
Another of the commission\u2019s concerns is that most prosecutions of the offense have been directed at low- to midranking officials and staff such as police and prison officers, rather than senior managers or politicians.<\/p>\n
Both Mountbatten-Windsor and Mandelson were released after police questioning.<\/p>\n
Marcus Johnstone, managing director of PCD Solicitors, a law firm that is not involved in the cases, said the bar is \u201cextremely high\u201d to reach a conviction, and that he does not expect to see any conviction against either man. He said if either was convicted, the sentences would probably be from one to 10 years in prison.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt must be noted that cases involving government ministers or trade envoys charged with misconduct in public office are extremely rare, and there is no real guidance as to the expected sentence,\u201d Johnstone said.<\/p>\n
\u201cAlthough an investigation is now taking place,\u201d he added, \u201cwe are still a long way away from a potential prosecution.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"By SYLVIA HUI LONDON (AP) \u2014 The\u00a0former Prince Andrew\u00a0and\u00a0Peter Mandelson, the U.K.\u2019s former ambassador to Washington, were arrested…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":23498,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":"","_share_on_mastodon":"0"},"categories":[104],"tags":[211,210,3419,15638,15639],"class_list":["post-23497","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-brussels","tag-belgium","tag-brussels","tag-epstein","tag-prince-andrew-charges","tag-why-prince-andrew-was-arrested"],"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/dk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/23497","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/dk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/dk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/dk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/dk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=23497"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/dk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/23497\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/dk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/23498"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/dk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=23497"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/dk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=23497"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/dk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=23497"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}