Peter Mandelson’s lawyers have claimed that the former cabinet minister was arrested after what they said was a “baseless suggestion that he was planning to leave the country”.
The former Labour grandee was released on bail in the early hours of Tuesday morning after his arrest on suspicion of misconduct in public office, which followed claims that he had leaked sensitive government information to the paedophile financier Jeffrey Epstein.
His law firm Mishcon de Reya said it had asked the Metropolitan Police “for the evidence relied upon to justify the arrest”.
It also said there had been an agreement with police that the UK’s former ambassador to Washington would be interviewed on a voluntary basis next month, but that had been hastily overturned amid a suggestion that he was planning to move abroad permanently.
In a statement released on Tuesday evening, the firm said: “Peter Mandelson was arrested yesterday despite an agreement with the police that he would attend an interview next month on a voluntary basis. The arrest was prompted by a baseless suggestion that he was planning to leave the country and take up permanent residence abroad.
“There is absolutely no truth whatsoever in any such suggestion. We have asked the MPs for the evidence relied upon to justify the arrest. Peter Mandelson’s overriding priority is to cooperate with the police investigation, as he has done throughout this process, and to clear his name.”
Earlier, the former BBC journalist Emily Maitlis said on her podcast The News Agents that she had seen a message she said had been sent by Lord Mandelson to a journalist colleague at 4am on Tuesday, hours after he was released from police custody.
Ms Maitlis said that the message talked about the previous agreement between the police and Lord Mandelson’s legal team for him to attend a voluntary interview in early March. In it, she said, he wrote that “police arrested me because they claimed the Lord Speaker received information that I was about to flee to the British Virgin Islands”, and described this as “complete fiction”.
The lord speaker, Michael Forsyth, said the accusation was “entirely false”.
A spokesperson for Lord Forsyth said: “Any suggestion at all that the lord speaker received information about Lord Mandelson’s movements, or communicated any such information to the Metropolitan Police Service, is entirely false and without foundation.”
Lord Mandelson has been accused of passing the information on to Epstein during his time as business secretary in Gordon Brown’s government.
Emails from 2009 contained in the Esptein files appeared to show that Lord Mandelson had passed on an assessment by one of Mr Brown’s advisers of potential policy measures including an “asset sales plan”.
The emails, released by the US Department of State, also appeared to have been sent to Epstein after he became a convicted sex offender.
The arrest on Monday followed search warrants at two addresses in Wiltshire and Camden.
The Metropolitan Police declined to comment beyond their statement issued just after 2am on Tuesday, which read: “A 72-year-old man arrested on suspicion of misconduct in public office has been released on bail pending further investigation.”
The force said later he has been bailed to the end of May.
