Lawyer backed by Pro-Gaddafi businessmen

Robert Black, QC, who has secured widespread publicity to protest the Libyan’s innocence and criticise the prosecution case against him in British and US media interviews, has insisted that he always acted independently.

But yesterday he admitted that companies with commercial interests in the country helped fund trips to meet the dictator’s officials and that the Libyan government may even have paid his hotel bills.

Last night it led angry relatives of some of the 270 Lockerbie victims to claim the disclosures backed up suspicions they had long harboured about the professor of Scots law at Edinburgh University.

Legal colleagues also claimed the payments called his independence into question while politicians said lawyers should in future be compelled to disclose financial links to any parties they are involved with.

Scotland on Sunday can reveal that Black undertook up to five trips to Libya between October 1993 and 2002, partly bankrolled by a consortium of British businessmen who stand to benefit if UN sanctions against the country are lifted.

The businessmen, whom Black refuses to name, believed there was a better chance of sanctions being removed and trade relations with Libya being resumed if an impasse over how to deal with the Libyan Lockerbie suspects was resolved.

Lifting the trade ban would have obvious benefits for Gaddafi’s regime as well as UK companies. The consortium was attempting to secure major engineering work in the country, including large-scale electrical power generation.

Black first met representatives of the consortium in 1992 and says he agreed, after hearing that the lifting of sanctions could help Scottish jobs, to do what he could to end the impasse in which Libya insisted the case against two accused Libyans be heard in their native country while the UK government insisted it should be in Britain.

It led to Black being given costs for scheduled flights to Gerba in Tunisia and travel on to Libya to discuss the Lockerbie case with key government figures. Ultimately Black, who spoke to Gaddafi among others, proposed the idea of the trial of al-Megrahi and his co-accused Al-Amin Khalifah Fhimah in a third country with no jury, but with a Scottish judge leading four other judges.

It led to the case being heard at Camp Zeist in the Netherlands by a panel of three Scottish judges, with al-Megrahi convicted and sentenced to life in prison, while Fhimah was acquitted.

As a result of the case, Libya has indicated it will pay more than 1.5bn to the families of victims of Pan Am Flight 103 after accepting ‘civil responsibility’ for the 1988 explosion, and UN sanctions are expected to be lifted soon.

Black, who has described the case against al-Megrahi as "a scandal", last night claimed to be the victim of a smear campaign and continued to insist he had acted independently.

He said: "I have been in contact with the Libyan government since October 1993 and have done various things, including putting forward proposals for the Lockerbie trial - but I have never been employed as a lawyer by the Libyan government.

"I’ve never been involved in the business side of it. I’m not a businessman. If there were negotiations between these businessmen and the Libyans on commercial matters I certainly was never involved."

But Black, who said his motivation was that the facts about the tragedy should be ventilated in a court of law, confirmed he received financial help from the businessmen looking to work with the Libyan government on trade opportunities. He estimated the travel costs they paid for would have amounted to "a few thousand pounds".

And he added: "None of the times I was out there under the auspices of these businessmen was I asked to pay a hotel bill, so whether the Libyan government was picking that up I don’t know."

While there is no suggestion that Black broke any rules, the disclosures last night angered some relatives of the Lockerbie victims. Eileen Monetti, of the Victims Of Pan Am Flight 103, who lost her 20-year-old son Rick in the bombing, said: "This man who is a lawyer is saying he never thought to ask who settled his bill?

"We in the US have always been suspicious of him saying these guys were innocent. I never thought of him as independent."

A source close to the al-Megrahi defence team said he, too, had long doubted Black’s independence.

The source said: "His activities were always shrouded with questions to which there were no answers. We found the whole thing suspicious."

Another legal insider added: "It is extraordinary for a lawyer to visit a foreign country on a number of occasions when he is effectively being ‘sponsored’ by a company which was attempting to re-engage with a country that traded in terror.

"I am surprised that he did not apply his otherwise intelligent mind more to the suffering victims of the Lockerbie bombing." A Scottish Tory spokesman added: "People in the public eye taking part in any sensitive issue should have their links, their sponsorships and connections disclosed. Then they would be less open to criticism."

But Jim Swire, a leading British Lockerbie campaigner whose daughter Flora died in the atrocity, rallied to Black’s defence. He was unaware of Black’s financial affairs but said he was "not at all" worried.

He added: "My attitude has always been the sooner Libya is allowed back into normal community relations, the better. Guilty or not, if they are regarded as a pariah state it greatly enhances the risks of them going back into terrorism."

Black rejects any suggestion that his independence has been compromised and insists he has been the victim of dirty tricks. He said: "I have been pretty active in the anti-Iraq war lobby which has not pleased certain people and my activities over Lockerbie have not pleased certain people so the fact that mud is being slung in my direction comes as no surprise."