JERSEY’S Institute of Directors has withdrawn a prestigious award from a local businessman, who has resigned from the organisation, after it emerged that he had a historical conviction relating to indecent images of children.
Paul Every, a former senior civil servant and commander in the Sea Cadets, was presented with the award for SME Business Director of the Year at the IoD awards last month at a glamorous event hosted by UK actress and comedian Sally Phillips and attended by senior Island figures including the Bailiff, Sir Timothy Le Cocq, and police chief Robin Smith.
In a press release announcing the results, the IoD said that the award recognised Mr Every’s “visionary” leadership at Solitaire Consulting, the firm he founded in 2011, as well as his “significant contributions to the SMEs’ – small- and medium-sized enterprises – business community”.
Following questions from the JEP about Mr Every’s record, an IoD Jersey spokesperson said: “We can confirm that Mr Every is no longer a member of the institute and his IoD Jersey Director of the Year Award has been withdrawn.”
In a statement sent to the JEP yesterday afternoon, Mr Every said: “I can confirm that I have resigned from the Institute of Directors and have returned the award recently given to me.
“The IoD Awards recognise excellence in business and even though I have decided to return the trophy, that cannot take away from the fact that I was chosen from among my peers to receive it.
“The award is testament to what I have achieved professionally over nearly two decades, and the incredible support of my family, my team, and my clients to build such a successful consultancy. I am proud of what we have created and am focused on our future.”
Mr Every was convicted in 2006 after a wide-ranging investigation by the US authorities under Operation Avalanche, a crackdown on child pornography that investigated a company called Landslide Productions, a Texas-based online pornography portal. It was found that he had used his credit card to subscribe to one of the sites for three months for $14.95.
Then legal adviser Matthew Jowitt, prosecuting Mr Every, said that one site, run by the company Landslide Productions, called “Very Young Teens”, featured abuse of children as young as three. Although the prosecution could not say that Mr Every downloaded material, they believed that he must have viewed the images. By subscribing, the court heard, he had induced and incited distribution.
In his defence, Advocate Olaf Blakeley said that Mr Every had subscribed to the website for three months and did not renew his subscription. There was no evidence that he ever visited the site, or downloaded or saved images, Advocate Blakeley said.
Mr Every was sentenced to 90 hours of community service, the equivalent of three months in custody, and ordered to pay half of the £1,500 in costs demanded by the prosecution. He resigned from his position with the States and as a commander of the Sea Cadets.
The offence took place in 1999, the year that the US investigated Landslide Productions, and Jersey police seized Mr Every’s computer in 2005. Mr Jowitt told the court in 2006 that the delay had been due to the need to gather evidence from the US authorities.
Mr Every was named in the 2015 Jersey Care Inquiry, with former deputy police chief Lenny Harper saying that when he was involved in the 2005 investigation into the senior civil servant, he “could not persuade the Sea Cadets to take allegations seriously and crucially could not be persuaded to take steps to safeguard the young Sea Cadets”.
He complained of long delays within the Law Officers’ Department in making the decision to charge Mr Every, and it emerged during the inquiry that it was only the intervention of the then Attorney General, Sir William Bailhache, that led to Mr Every being charged and eventually convicted.
Giving evidence at the inquiry, Mr Harper alleged that a senior police officer had tipped Mr Every off that he was being investigated, giving him time to wipe his computer. Mr Harper also accused senior officials in the Jersey government of warning Mr Every that he was a person of interest and that his home address was to be searched.
In a statement given at the time, the States police denied Mr Harper’s claim. The inquiry also heard that Mr Every “periodically” wiped his hard drive and that his actions before his arrest could have been “a coincidence”.
“You can have one coincidence too many,” Mr Harper said at the time.
“It created an uncomfortable feeling. He was a senior person in the public sector. He was well connected. He knew a lot of people on a personal basis. It was a worrying development.”
