Mystery man: Kevin Halligen, the private eye whose company was employed by the McCanns, pictured with girlfriend Shirin Trachiotis in Washington, where in one month he spent more than £3,000 on dining out

But The Mail on Sunday can reveal today that despite setting up a hotline for potential informants and witnesses, none of the hundreds of calls received by a call centre hired by Halligen, 48, was listened to by Oakley investigators - and Halligen also bragged to his colleagues that he had executed a series of peculiar tactics to find Madeleine.

A private eye whose company was paid £500,000 from a public fund to find Madeleine McCann squandered the money on a series of bizarre schemes that had no chance of locating the missing child.
Kevin Halligen, who claimed to have experience in the British secret services, was arrested last week in an Oxford hotel after an FBI manhunt over an unrelated £1.3million fraud case in America.
His investigations company, Oakley International, was taken on in March last year by the Find Madeleine Fund and her parents Kate and Gerry McCann.

He claimed to have hired an actor to pretend to be a 'drunken priest' who would seek confessions as he toured the bars of Praia da Luz, the resort where Madeleine disappeared in May 2007.
And he told colleagues that a family with a Madeleine lookalike daughter had been paid to set up home in a nearby resort in order to tempt out a potential kidnapper.

Meanwhile, a paper trail obtained by The Mail on Sunday shows that Halligen, a former director of a catering firm, launched an extraordinary spending spree on hotels, cigar bars, restaurants and luxury goods while he was in the pay of the Find Madeleine Fund, and in the period shortly after he was fired last summer.

Missing: Madeleine McCann disappeared in May 2007

Documents show that in his first two months as lead investigator in the search for Madeleine, Halligen spent £7,000 on a personal chauffeur.
A few months later, on a short trip to New York with a girlfriend, he lavished £1,600 on Salvatore Ferragamo leather goods, £5,500 on handbags, £500 on an Italian meal, £150 on a pair of designer glasses and £900 on a three-night stay at the five-star Renaissance Hotel.

And in a one-month visit to Washington, where he owned a £1.5million mansion, he spent more than £3,000 on dining out and £6,000 on a room at the US capital's Intercontinental Hotel.
He also paid out more than £50,000 on plumbing and mosaic tiling for his house in Great Falls, Virginia - a property in which he has never spent a night because of constant home-improvement work.
The revelations will dismay everyone who donated to the Find Madeleine Fund. But perhaps of most concern is the lack of attention paid to the hundreds of phone calls received by the Madeleine hotline.

Halligen and Oakley International, based in Washington, failed to listen to a single call received on the hotline set up for potential informants by Kate and Gerry McCann last year.
Johan Selle, the director of operations at iJet, the US firm that managed the Find Madeleine phone line, revealed that for a year nobody even asked his company if they could listen to any of the calls received.
Mr Selle said his operators, in Annapolis, Virginia, had answered 'hundreds of calls', but the information seemed wasted - possibly squandering valuable leads.

He said: 'We delivered Oakley a report with a summary of the calls and said if they wanted to come back they could listen to the recording, but nobody did.

'For someone with an understanding of the case it would be very easy for some to say that maybe 80 or 90 per cent of the calls were hogwash, but there may be a percentage where one would say maybe we should listen to this one or listen to that one. But our understanding is that this never took place.

'We are not sure whether Halligen provided our report to the family or to the trust or to those working with them or to the teams working after him, because no one came back to us.
'We sent the report to Oakley group and our assumption was that they were using it as a piece in the puzzle. But it appears that wasn't the case.'
The firm says it was not paid for it services by Halligen or Oakley International.

Arrested: Kevin Halligen being led away by a policeman in Oxford

Two of Halligen's former colleagues in the investigation, John Taylor and Dr Richard Parton, said they became concerned early on in their working relationship with the self- styled 'super-spy'.
Dr Parton, whose company Psyintel was employed for its expertise on interview techniques, said he and his partner had been encouraged by Halligen to get involved with the high-profile case.
Halligen had also mentioned other future projects that could net them millions of pounds, although these schemes never came to fruition.

But Dr Parton said fears over Halligen's suitability for the job first arose when the private detective suddenly asked him to stop calling him Richard, the name by which they had known him for several years. He then also raised details of Halligen's extraordinary tactics to find Madeleine.

Dr Parton, who claims he was later left with an unpaid invoice for £50,000, said: 'It was very strange. I had met him years earlier and it had been Richard. Then before a meeting with some people who wanted a presentation on my techniques, I was asked to call him Kevin from then on. I thought it was odd but he was so secretive and that was just the way he was.
'Whenever we had a meeting he would also always immediately say that he needed to leave for a flight. Every time. He would always also try to get the conversation around to talking about the psychological characteristics of a sociopath.'

Dr Parton added: 'I repeatedly told him his investigators on the ground in Portugal were not doing a proper job but he insisted lots of things were going on I didn't know about.

'That is when he told me about some of his schemes, such as the drunken priest seeking confessions from people drinking in the bars of Praia da Luz and the family with a girl who looked similar to Madeleine. This family were set up, apparently, in a resort near to Praia da Luz just to sit and wait and see what happened.
'It was all such a waste of money and time.'

However, it was only later, when tape recordings of interviews undertaken in Praia da Luz were sent to Dr Parton and Mr Taylor, in Washington, that they started to fear the worst for the investigation.
Mr Taylor said: 'The quality of the interviews was terrible, very amateurish. The noise in the background was bad, the interview questions were useless and the subjects were irrelevant. I told them to stop wasting time and money on such low-key figures - homeless people and receptionists who knew nothing.'

Kevin Halligen's US identity card

Things came to a head after Halligen reneged on repeated promises to pay their invoice. Dr Parton said: 'I took him to one side and asked when I was due to be paid. Three days later he disappeared. He had fled to Rome with his girlfriend.'

It was then that Dr Parton and Mr Taylor started to contact others who had been hired by Oakley International. Mr Taylor added: 'He would hire lots of people to do work but only pay a few of them. Meanwhile, he was spending lots of money on his own lifestyle. It only gave the appearance that work was being done.'

They also contacted Maria Dybczak, a trade lawyer for the US Commerce Department, whom they understood to be Halligen's wife. It emerged she had agreed to go along with a fake wedding service to keep up appearances for Halligen.

Dr Parton said: 'She admitted she wasn't proud of it but she had been tricked, too. He claimed that a job he was doing with the CIA meant that he couldn't have his name on a marriage certificate.
'She was manipulated into going along with a fake wedding with an actor posing as a priest. He said they would get properly married a few weeks later, but that never happened.'
Shortly afterwards Halligen fled to Rome with a girlfriend, named in a writ filed by another former colleague as Shirin Trachiotis, a glamorous doctor based in Washington.

Almost immediately after arriving in Rome on their first-class Lufthansa tickets, Halligen withdrew hundreds of thousands of pounds more from Oakley International's bank accounts and spent £8,000 on a luxury hotel before slinking back to the UK a few months later.

Dr Parton said: 'He has left a trail of debts across America and the UK. But the horrible truth is that he stole from the McCanns what they really couldn't afford - time.'
Following a short hearing at Westminster Magistrates' Court last week, Halligen was refused bail and was remanded in custody until December 2, when the next stage of his case for extradition will be heard.

The US Department of Justice issued an indictment for Halligen, from Surrey, earlier this month alleging that he tried to defraud a London law firm.
They claim he took £1.3million as part of a deal to secure the release of Dutch business executives arrested in the Ivory Coast. Instead, it is claimed, he spent it on a mansion, a gift to his girlfriend, cash machine withdrawals and debit-card transactions.

Kate and Gerry McCanns' spokesman Clarence Mitchell refused to be drawn on the details of Oakley's investigation, much of which, it is understood, the McCanns were unaware of. He said: 'The first phase of the contract was satisfactorily seen through, such as the setting up of the hotline. Towards the end of it there were question marks about delivery and the relationship was terminated.
'Given Mr Halligen is in custody it is inappropriate to comment further.'

Explore more:

People:

Gerry McCann,

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Clarence Mitchell,

Madeleine McCann

Places:

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London,

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Rome,

Oxford,

New York,

United Kingdom,

Portugal,

America

Organisations:

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Find Madeleine Fund

Madeleine McCann investigator didn't listen to ANY tip-offs given to hotline - and squandered £500,000

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Kevin Halligen was arrested at an hotel in Oxford

 

A businessman hired to help look for Madeleine McCann and wanted by the FBI on fraud charges has appeared in court.

Kevin Halligen was arrested at an Oxford hotel on Tuesday and refused bail at London's City of Westminster Magistrates' Court on Wednesday.

The 48-year-old from Surrey is facing extradition to the US, where he is wanted for an alleged £1.2m fraud.
The Irish national was hired by Madeleine's parents, Kate and Gerry, as a security consultant.
His Washington-based company, Oakley International, was paid about £300,000 to help search for Madeleine, who was nearly four when she vanished from an Algarve holiday flat on 3 May 2007.
The firm had initially been awarded a £500,000 contract, but the McCanns terminated the arrangement before paying any more fees.

'Bought mansion'

The US Department of Justice issued an indictment for Mr Halligen earlier this month, alleging he tried to defraud a London law firm of £1.2m ($2.1m).
It says he took the money as part of a deal to secure the release of Dutch business executives arrested in the Ivory Coast, but instead spent the money on buying a mansion and gifts.
The magistrates' court heard he had been staying at a series of addresses during the past eight months to evade reporters interested in the McCann case.

I note the gravity of the offences alleged and the high value involved Judge Howard Riddle Madeleine businessman arrested

Melanie Cumberland, acting for the UK government, told the court Mr Halligen was wanted in the US for taking money from the Dutch company Trafigura, via a London-based law firm.
She said he had been employed after the two executives had been arrested following a petrochemical spill on the Ivory Coast.

Instead, she said, he had spent £1m ($1.7m) on a mansion, £85,000 ($141,000) on a gift to his girlfriend and more than £26,000 ($43,000) in cash on other items.

She said when he had been arrested at the Old Bank Hotel in Oxford over a discrepancy in a bill of about £5,000, police had discovered he had already packed his bag to leave.
Refusing bail, Judge Howard Riddle said: "I note the gravity of the offences alleged and the high value involved.

"At this stage, comparatively little is known about his movements, how he came to be in this country and where he has been staying."
The court heard a full extradition request was likely to be submitted by the US authorities by the end of January. 

Businessman hired to look for Madeleine denied bail

 

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Madeleine ‘fraudster’ is nicked

A DODGY "detective" on the run accused of swindling the Madeleine McCann fund out of £300,000 was nicked last night - thanks to The Sun.

Kevin Halligen, 50, was led from his bolthole in handcuffs after our investigators staked out a luxury Oxford hotel then tipped off cops. 

The fugitive whined to police: "How did you find me?"

'On Tuesday, the manager of the Old Bank contacted local police concerning this man called Kevin Halligen.

Alleged serial fraudster Halligen was just about to fly the coop when police swooped.

Detectives had been hunting him for months.

Handcuffed ... Kevin Halligen – thanks to The Sun

BILLY GRIFFITHS

But it was Britain's No1 paper that finally found him.

Our team tipped off police that he and his lover were about to flee after we staked out their bolthole.

Halligen, who touts himself as a private investigator, is accused of cruelly targeting the fund launched to find missing Maddie so he could swindle it out of more than £300,000.

Last night cops who found him and his girlfriend with their bags packed were holding him over his unpaid bill at the plush Old Bank hotel in Oxford.

It was said to run into tens of thousands. But that, and the cash he is accused of taking from the Maddie fund, are the least of his worries.
'Given that an arrest has been made it would be inappropriate for us to comment.''

Fund ... Madeleine

He faces extradition to the US over an even BIGGER alleged con.

The Dubliner is wanted by the FBI for a £1.2MILLION fraud.

Halligen got involved with anguished Kate and Gerry McCann a year after the 2007 disappearance of their daughter - then aged three - on a family holiday in Portugal.

He had set up his own investigation firm Oakley International in Washington and claimed to have worked for MI5 and the CIA.

Crucially he boasted his "contacts" in the US capital could provide hi-tech satellite imagery to help the search.

Luxury hideout ... Old Bank in Oxford

He won a £500,000 contract as the McCanns, both 41-year-old doctors from Rothley, Leics, prayed for clues.

Much of the cash is said to have gone on luxury hotels, chauffeured limos and first-class flights as he lived the high life.

Last night his bill at the Oxford hotel he checked into three months ago - under the alias Richard Stratton - was said to top £14,000 in drinks ALONE.

A source there said: "Halligen had actually packed his bags and was making arrangements to leave in a cab when the cops finally turned up.

"His face turned ghostly white - he got the shock of his life."

Torment ... parents Gerry and Kate

The Sun had watched just minutes earlier as he and his lover casually smoked a cigarette on the hotel terrace before their planned exit.

We previously spotted him in the bar, where he ordered a glass of wine for an elderly guest, barking: "Stick that on my room - it's on me."

Minutes later he whispered to another guest: "Of course, I have to keep a low profile.

"I'm a former member of the secret services so I can't attract attention."

Creditors are chasing him over £3million he is said to owe.

Halligen is said to have even conned an ex-director of the SAS. Major-General John Holmes, a former SAS commander, introduced him to business contacts - now said to be counting the cost.

He claimed: "We were all taken in."

Another alleged victim is Henri Exton - former national head of police undercover operations. He is said to be owed £100,000.

Washington lobbyist Andre Hollis claims to have lost £50,000 and top London lawyer Mark Aspinall is said - along with his company - to be owed £450,000.

Staff at the Oxford hotel told how Halligen loved to regale them with "hush-hush" talk about MI5, MI6 and the CIA.

The source said: "We just thought he was a bit of an eccentric."

Madeleine ‘fraudster’ is nicked

  The following subject has failed to comply with the Notification Requirements under the Sexual Offences Act 2003 and is currently wanted urgently by the Child Exploitation and Online Protection (CEOP) Centre.

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