LONDON – No charges will be filed against associates of former Prime Minister Tony Blair who were arrested during a lengthy police investigation of political funding, the Crown Prosecution Service said Friday.

Drawing an end to the probe that clouded Blair’s last year in office, senior prosecutor Carmen Dowd said there was insufficient evidence to support the prosecution of anyone in the case.

“This investigation has ended as I always expected it would,” Blair said in a statement.

“Those involved have been through a terrible, even traumatic time. Much of what has been written and said about them has been deeply unfair, and I am very pleased for all of them that it is now over,” he said.

Dowd, who heads the agency’s Special Crime Division, said she had considered charges under 1925 legislation banning the sale of honors such as knighthoods and seats in the House of Lords, offenses of perverting the course of justice, and under the Political Parties and Referendums Act.

“Having considered all of the evidence in this case I have decided that there is insufficient evidence to provide a realistic prospect of conviction against any individual for any offense in relation to this matter,” she said, reading a statement. She took no questions.

The 15-month investigation followed a complaint by a Scottish National Party legislator, Angus MacNeil, alleging that several individuals had agreed to make substantial loans to Blair’s Labour Party on the understanding that they would be made members of the House of Lords.

The probe begun in March 2006 later broadened to include the possibility of a cover-up.

News of the prosecutors’ decision leaked out Thursday night, to the relief of Blair’s associates.

“I think my face tells how I feel,” a beaming Lord Levy, Blair’s former fundraiser who was arrested twice during the police investigation, told reporters Friday.

Blair himself became the first serving prime minister to be interviewed by police in a criminal investigation, though he was questioned as a witness not a suspect.

“We always maintained privately that it would come to this point because we had never done anything wrong,” said former Blair aide John McTernan, who had also been arrested.

“I think it is all over and the police in my experience were scrupulously fair in the way they treated me. I believe they did the same with my colleagues,” McTernan said.

Also arrested during the investigation were Blair aide Ruth Turner and biotech tycoon Sir Christopher Evans, who loaned $2 million to Blair’s Labour Party.

The probe was led by Metropolitan Police Assistant Commissioner John Yates, whose team interviewed more than 130 people and gathered more than 6,000 documents before submitting a file to prosecutors in April.

“There is no complaint from any person that they have been offered a gift, etc., in exchange for an honor. There is no complaint from any person that they have been asked to make a gift, etc., in exchange for an honor,” Dowd said in a document elaborating on her decision.

“There is furthermore substantial and reliable evidence that there were proper reasons for the inclusion of all those whose names appeared” on a list of nominees to the House of Lords in 2005, “that each was a credible candidate for a peerage, irrespective of any financial assistance that they had given, or might give, to the Labour Party,” the document added.

Yates said the investigation was prolonged by questions of whether there was a conspiracy to pervert the course of justice.

“When (there are) allegations such as these, which were of the utmost seriousness, the investigation had to be thorough and meticulous in every respect,” Yates said.

MacNeil expressed surprise at the prosecutors’ decision.

“It seems strange to me that the CPS has sustained this investigation and encouraged the police to carry on, then to say it has been a wild goose chase,” MacNeil said before the official announcement.

Tony Wright, who chairs a House of Commons committee investigating political funding and the honors system, said it was a “scandal” that donors to political parties have tended to get higher honors.

“I’m affronted by it. I think everybody else is affronted by it. But it does not require policemen to come and crawl all over our political system to tell us something we know, and also what we are getting to grips with,” Wright, a member of the Labour Party, told Sky News.

On the Net:

Crown Prosecution Service: http://www.cps.gov.uk/news/pressreleases/146_07.html

A service of the Associated Press(AP)