METROPOLITAN Police chiefs in the last 18 months have been schmoozed with corporate gifts including Wimbledon tickets, meals at expensive restaurants and vitamin pills.


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Sir Paul Stephenson, the Met’s boss, took advantage of the generosity of big business in the form of rugby tickets from IT consultants Capgemini and Rolling Stones tickets from O2, as well as fancy meals courtesy of BT and Mercedes Benz.

Former Met boss Sir Iain Blair was the one handed the vitamin boost – Vitabiotics-Wellman tablets – from businessman Dr Katar Lalvani. Blair also received Harrods champagne.

Among the many other gifts showered on the 12 members of the Met’s Police Management Board – its top brass – were Wimbledon tickets from Unisys for Alisa Beaton, the PMB’s Director of Information, and wine from the government of Israel for former counter-terrorism supremo Robert Quick.

Details of the gifts came to light after a Freedom of Information request, reports The Guardian.

Meanwhile, tabs are to be kept on beat officers by a new Automatic Person Location System, which works a bit like the Marauders Map out of Harry Potter.

Signals will be sent at regular intervals from a chip in an officer’s hi-tech handset to a central control point, which will the plot the location on a map.