Oil bribery whistleblower wins Monaco court battle
A BRITISH whistleblower who exposed a £350m oil bribery scandal in Monaco has won a legal battle to clear his name two years after he was wrongly arrested and incarcerated.
Monaco’s appeal court on Monday threw out an attempt by the principality’s prosecutors to try to bring Jonathan Taylor to court on “trumped up” allegations of corruption.
The move was seen as revenge for Mr Taylor lifting the lid on alleged multimillion-pound corruption at Monacobased SBM Offshore, where he previously worked.
The legal battle forced him to live in virtual isolation in Croatia for nearly a year after he was arrested on an Interpol warrant from Monaco, separating him from his wife and three children, who remained in Hampshire.
Now, Monaco’s appeal court has rejected an appeal by the Monegasque public prosecutor against the investigating judge’s decision to end their inquiries into Mr Taylor. He told The Daily Telegraph: “While this welcome news will not bring me back my career or the year I lost under house arrest in Croatia, it does give me back control of my life.
“I shall now use that control to hold to account those who tried and very nearly succeeded in silencing me for uncovering one of the largest cases of systematic corporate fraud ever exposed.”
The decision by the appeal court in Monaco was the last legal attempt by the Monaco prosecutors to bring Mr Taylor before their courts. He had been arrested in 2020 on the Interpol warrant when he landed in Dubrovnik with his family. Last year, the Croatian justice minister rejected a bid by Monaco to extradite him to the principality to face allegations of “attempted extortion”.