Paralegal who passed CPS intelligence to criminal gang leaders after starting relationship with kingpin jailed for 9 years
5 May 2023, 22:48
A former Crown Prosecution Service (CPS) employee who was found guilty of passing highly sensitive intelligence material to organised crime gangs has been sentenced to nine years in prison.
Rachel Simpson, 39, from Newport, admitted 29 counts of unauthorised access of a computer system and two counts of misconduct in a public office when she appeared before Cardiff Crown Court.
She was found to have made repeated searches on CPS and crown court computers that related to cases she had no involvement in, before passing that information onto the gangs.
Describing her actions as "inexplicable", the court heard how Simpson began her illegal searches after she entered into a relationship with a man "involved in serious organised crime."
Simpson is said to have accessed the files between 2016 and 2020.
Passing files onto the gang leaders via a third party, Simpson, a mother-of-one, was caught after officers from a regional organised crime unit known as Tarian hacked an encrypted chat between high-level drug dealers.
Upon finding a picture of a highly classified CPS document, Simpson was arrested in June 2020.
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Police initially investigated a "very limited number of people" who would have had access to such classified documents before finding Simpson to be the leak.
Prosecutor Mr Temkin said: "The defendant abused her position to research and obtain sensitive information about prominent criminals and organised crime investigations in South Wales.
"She did so by unauthorised access to the Crown Prosecution Service computer system and the Crown Court digital system."
He continued: "Many of the cases accessed by the defendant were handled by the Crown Prosecution Service complex case unit, which deals with the most serious, sensitive or complex cases, the defendant has never worked in that unit and should have been inaccessible to her."
He went on to explain that the defendant's actions were uncovered after Tarian officers hacked an encrypted EncroChat messaging system - a messaging service regularly used by criminals due to its safe nature.
Although it's not known the specific number of searches undertaken, Simpson was found to have passed information on following searches on two specific cases.
Mr Temkin said: "As part of an EncroChat conversation the National Crime Agency discovered photographs of a sensitive and privileged police document.'That had been sent from one criminal to another, both of those criminals were involved in multi-kilo trafficking of Class A drugs."
"The defendant provided material to third parties rather than directly to the criminal fraternity."
