Pilot charged with helping Nadir flee

A BRITISH pilot has been charged in the UK with perverting the course of justice by helping fugitive Turkish Cypriot tycoon Asil Nadir to flee Britain.

Peter Dimond, 56, was detained at Fishguard in Wales while trying to board a ferry to the Irish Republic.

According to the Sunday Times, he is alleged to have masterminded the getaway of Nadir, the former chairman of Polly Peck when the failed tycoon jumped his sterling £3.5 million bail in 1993.

Two planes and six airfields were used in the flight from Britain.

Nadir made the dramatic night-time flight from Compton Abbas in Dorset to Beauvais in northern France, just four months before his trial on charges of theft and false accounting amounting to £31 million sterling.

In France he was picked up by a private jet and flown to the occupied area, which has no extradition treaty with Britain because it is an unrecognised state.

The newspaper said it is believed that Dimond has spent most of the past five years living in the north, at the Jasmine Court Hotel in Kyrenia.

Yesterday’s Daily Telegraph quoted a spokesman for Scotland Yard as saying Dimond had been charged with one count of perverting justice.

The Cyprus Mail is the only English-language daily newspaper published in Cyprus. It was established in 1945 and today, with its popular and widely-read website, the Cyprus Mail is among the most trusted news sites in Cyprus. The newspaper is not affiliated with any political parties and has always striven to maintain its independence. Over the past 70-plus years, the Cyprus Mail, with a small dedicated team, has covered momentous events in Cyprus’ modern history, chronicling the last gasps of British colonial rule, Cyprus’ truncated independence, the coup and Turkish invasion, and the decades of negotiations to stitch the divided island back together, plus a myriad of scandals, murders, and human interests stories that capture the island and its -people. Observers describe it as politically conservative.