Lord Peter Mandelson is denying accusations that he was preparing to flee the United Kingdom before his arrest by the Metropolitan Police.
The former British ambassador to the United States was released from police custody on Tuesday after having been detained the previous day, according to his lawyers at Mishcon de Reya. Mandelson said it was a “baseless suggestion” that he was planning to resettle in a foreign country amid the scandal of his relationship with convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein.
“Peter Mandelson was arrested yesterday despite an agreement with the police that he would attend an interview next month on a voluntary basis,” a Tuesday statement from Mandelson’s legal counsel stated. “The arrest was prompted by a baseless suggestion that he was planning to leave the country and take up permanent residence abroad.”
“There is absolutely no truth whatsoever in any such suggestion,” the statement continued. “Peter Mandelson’s overriding priority is to cooperate with the police investigation, as he has done throughout this process, and to clear his name.
”Mishcon de Reya is now requesting the Metropolitan Police to produce the “evidence relied upon to justify the arrest.”
Mandelson, as well as Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor, have dominated the British press for weeks after the latest tranche of Epstein emails released by the U.S. government further exposed their illicit leaking of state information to the deceased financier.
Former BBC journalist Emily Maitlis, who gained international notoriety after interviewing then-Prince Andrew about his relationship with Epstein, claimed on her podcast The News Agents that she viewed a Tuesday message from Mandelson to another journalist. In the message the former ambassador alleged the “police arrested me because they claimed the Lord Speaker received information that I was about to flee to the British Virgin Islands.”
Madelson reportedly dismissed the allegation as “complete fiction.”
Michael Forsyth, the Lord Speaker to whom Mandelson was referring in the alleged message, clarified to the public that he had not communicated any such tip to the authorities.
His office wrote: “Any suggestion at all that the lord speaker received information about Lord Mandelson’s movements, or communicated any such information to the Metropolitan Police Service, is entirely false and without foundation.”
UK POLICE ARREST ANDREW MOUNTBATTEN-WINDSOR OVER MISCONDUCT TIED TO JEFFREY EPSTEIN
The Thames Valley Police have completed their investigation of Mountbatten-Windsor’s former Royal Lodge residence.
“Officers have now left the location we have been searching in Berkshire,” the department announced in a statement late Tuesday. “This concludes the search activity that commenced following our arrest of a man in his sixties from Norfolk on Thursday.”
Trade Minister Sir Chris Bryant announced at the conclusion of a Tuesday debate in the House of Commons that the government will release the files related to his vetting to become a U.K. trade envoy in 2001 “as soon as is practicable and possible within the law.”
