BELEAGUERED Chief Constable Barry Shaw has come under renewed fire after refusing to fill in the blanks in the balance sheet for Operation Lancet.

The Cleveland Police chief said the overall cost of the three-year long investigation amouned to £3.25m, in a report to the Police Authority last week.

But a breakdown of totals revealed that expenditure, including the salaries of eight suspended officers, had not been accounted for.

And a 50 per cent increase in the budget for special inquiries, from £1m to £1.5m, has also not been explained.

A Cleveland Police spokes-man said no further information would be provided, unless it was requested by the Police Authority.

But MP Ashok Kumar criticised Mr Shaw for refusing to explain how taxpayers' money had been spent.

The Middlesbrough South and East Cleveland MP, a long-standing critic of the handling of the inquiry, said: "It is absolutely shameful. The Chief Constable gets his salary paid by the public purse and he has the cheek to say he is not going to answer questions."

The police spokesman said no further information had been requested by the Police Authority but Mr Kumar said this was a damning indictment of the authority's inability to monitor the situation.

He said: "The Police Authority has miserably failed to make the Chief Constable accountable. Democracy is being thrown out of the window."

Mr Kumar said the salaries of the suspended officers would come in at about £1.5m, and the Chief Constable's figure also did not include the cost of his own time and other inquiries set up alongside Lancet.

The police spokesman said: "The information provided is all that is in the public domain. It is not our intention to provide data at a more detailed level."

The Crown Prosecution Service last week announced that no criminal charges would be brought under Lancet, although disciplinary hearings could still take place.

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