Alex was asked to meet Fernandez the following day.
The company had been in financial trouble, and Alex says he was owed thousands in unpaid invoices, so he decided to record the meeting on a mobile phone in his jacket pocket, to “protect himself”.
At the start of the meeting, Alex’s other phone is apparently taken off him by force. A man who identifies himself as “Mark” and refuses to give his surname says the device belongs to the company, but he won’t allow Alex to recover his personal data from the phone.
“I was so scared because this guy was, like, three times my size,” Alex said in an interview with the BBC.
The BBC has established that “Mark” is a former soldier turned security adviser, Mark Harry. He said he understands “that this matter was handled by the appropriate authorities at the time. I strongly dispute the allegations made.”
In the recording, Fernandez and Harry proceed to threaten Alex with jail for allegedly hacking emails. They don’t specify, but they clearly imply that the emails hacked are those of Ferguson. Fernandez says he breached the “Palace’s confidentiality agreement”.
Alex denies hacking. He says that a company email account was set up for Ferguson, but because she never activated it, messages addressed to her were forwarded to a common inbox.
Fernandez and Harry continue to threaten Alex. Fernandez says he is in “so deep… he has no idea” and in a “world of pain”, and says he faces two years in jail for breaches of the Computer Misuse Act.
The two say that other people at the company are also involved in the alleged hacking, and are facing prison sentences. One, they say, is “facing eight years”.