Waste boss jailed over 'spying' plot

ONE of Britain's wealthiest men has been jailed for six months for hiring a crooked detective agency to spy on Northamptonshire County Council.

Businessman Adrian Kirby, who has made £65m from waste disposal, wanted to tap phones and hack into computers to stop complaints about alleged illegal dumping.

The 47-year-old asked a London-based agency to spy on a planning officer at Northamptonshire County Council, as well as employees of Peterborough local authority, concerning complaints over the dumping of toxic waste.

The case is thought to have involved the site at King's Cliffe, which is on the county border with Cambridgeshire.

A disagreement between the site's operators, Wasteco, which was managed by Kirby, and the Environment Agency in 2004 saw the site forced to close temporarily.

Kirby, who admitted conspiring to intercept communications, plotted to make unauthorised modifications to a computer and paid the agency to spy on local residents, civil servants and one of his former site managers suspected of helping investigate him.

Hundreds of phone lines were compromised by the company, which used an array of illegal hi-tech snooping equipment to reroute and record conversations.