Copeland in an email yesterday to answer Horizon’s inquiry stated that Beattie left the Beijing conference and stayed at the Nikko hotel in Dalian, China with his friend Wang Fang.
Copeland said that an airline’s passenger manifest indicated that Fang accompanied Beattie to China.Copeland added that “all the time Beattie was on this personal trip, he was receiving per diem from the Republic of Palau as if he were attending the Beijing conference in his official government capacity.”“While Beattie took 9 days of per diem for this conference, the evidence shows that he was on personal business away from the conference for at least some of those days,” Copeland said.“Thus, the photograph Beattie submitted (in his letter to the editor published on February 27) does little to put that allegation to rest. Nor does it do away with any of the other allegations made against Beattie,” Copeland went on saying.Beattie wrote a letter to the editor in response to allegations that he fraudulently misused government resources by receiving funding to participate in the International Association of Anti-Corruption Authorities in Beijing in 2006.Beattie attached a picture that would shows that he attended the conference to contradict the allegations that he did not attend the conference.Copeland also denied Beattie’s allegations that the Office of the Special Prosecutor had released information about the case while an investigation was ongoing.“That is not true. When the investigation was ongoing, the office did not respond to reporters’ questions about the investigation. Only after the investigation had been completed were the investigation’s results disclosed,” Copeland said.“I also want to correct the impression that AG Beattie made when he said that the Office of the Special Prosecutor wasn’t independent of the Ombudsman, or that other paper had special access to information from this office.”“That is not true. The Ombudsman doesn’t have access to the files of this office, nor does he have a special relationship beyond that of any other office in government. Nor was this office the source of the information for other paper’s article about this story. The other paper had the information they used in their story long before my investigators did, and no one from our office disclosed any information to the other paper regarding this matter. In fact, I don’t believe that this office even had the photos that were used on other paper’s front page,” Copeland stated in his email.
