Observed 9 September 2026. Acquisition CLOSED. One new police-guide official-reader record and one new government annual-report original, compared with the accepted August2025 Gateway announcement and posted2020 Ashiko policy. No referral form, account, contact, operational endpoint, non-public appendix or visible UI was accessed.
The concrete new finding
The posted [PIPCU Referral Guide](http[local research file] PDF4, says a Steering Group comprising IPO, City of London Police, rights holders and industry bodies agreed broad priorities: physical goods with an online connection and digital content. This is an explicit shared priority-setting role, not just consultation attendance.
PDF5 lists six acceptance considerations: remit; organised activity; potential public-safety danger and the extent of actual or anticipated financial loss or reputational harm to the rights holder/referrer; continuing offending; realistic asset recovery; and prospects of identifying suspects and prosecuting successfully. Historical offending is exceptional. It excludes certain product categories and normally requires the original agency to refer previously investigated matters.
PDF6–8 expect investigative groundwork, original evidence and explained inferences from referrers. PDF9 describes DI refusal letters giving reasons, alternatives and a ten-working-day decision aim, with contact if complexity/information needs prevent it. Accepted referrers must support evidential proceedings. PDF10 permits proportionate focus/disruption, CPS cooperation and preservation of relevant material.
The guide is undated in the inspected text. PDF2 mentions October2014 funding; it describes an old referral form. The search engine's age estimate is not a publication date. These are historical posted rules, not established current Gateway procedure.
What the later evidence does and does not establish
The accepted [12 August2025 announcement](http[local research file] expressly replaced the PIPCU form from 11August. Initial assessment and prioritisation now sit with IPO's Gateway team, which may develop intelligence or refer onward. It supplies no weighted scoring scheme, commitment to the old ten-day target, industry vote, complaint escalation or adoption of the guide's exact criteria. The police guide's case-acceptance provisions also should not be imposed on every Ashiko bulk suspension: the separately posted2020 policy supplies its own DCI suspension-authorization rule.
A later official implementation account is available in the [IPO annual report for 2022/23](http[local research file] Counter infringement, reader427–441. It describes reformed IPCG structures as existing: a mixed enforcement/industry delivery group, an industry advisory committee, and an executive board of senior industry/enforcement decisionmakers. The report links these arrangements to tactical cooperation and strategic coordination. This advances beyond the earlier strategy's promise to build coordination, but is the institution's report of implementation, not an acquired constitution, minutes or observed case decision.
The same section says an internal Strategic Threat Assessment was completed in November2022 while a public version was being developed; an external monitoring/evaluation commission aimed for May2023. Neither the assessment nor the evaluation output was acquired here. The report period is 1April2022–31March2023, with publication identified as July2023; the inspected HTML says updated9January2025. Its present-tense descriptions are not September2026 currency guarantees.
The IPCG executive board, PIPCU Steering Group and IPO Gateway are not identified as one body. No acquired instrument assigns the IPCG industry representatives authority to score individual Gateway referrals or sign police suspension requests. Nor is an industry participant's police-database access implied. Root separately owns the already-retained2022 strategy and FY2025/26 enforcement-capability comparison; their promises and reported implementation remain source-specific.
Accountability and competing interpretations
Industry participation in choosing a broad remit and a harm factor explicitly including referrer interests are substantive agenda-setting mechanisms. The guide also expects evidence, police explanations, proportionate action and prosecution-service involvement. Those are concrete counterweights on paper, not independent proof of each decision's quality. Neither industry command nor complete immunity from industry influence follows.
The acquired public texts do not provide a current Gateway conflict/recusal protocol, weights, escalation rights, performance assessment or an executed allocation of authority between these bodies. The historical guide does not state committee quorum, voting shares or recusal rules. This bounded failure to locate them is not proof they do not exist, were withheld, or were ignored. No general policing or corporate governance rule was substituted for a Gateway-specific instrument.
The next discriminating records are the current Gateway assessment/priority SOP and reasoned allocation or refusal template, and the PIPCU Steering Group/IPCG terms of reference, continuity decision and conflict register or recusal provision. Likely holders are IPO Intelligence and Law Enforcement and City of London Police/PIPCU. A redacted tasking decision could distinguish industry-informed harm criteria from preferential attention to contributors. No approach to those holders is authorized or attempted here.
Custody and finite scope
The new guide was read in the official reader at cover/PDF1; introduction/history/PDF2–3; broad priorities/PDF4; all six acceptance factors/PDF5; referral evidential instructions/PDF6–8; response/accountability/PDF9; resource/proportionality/preservation provisions/PDF10; and feedback statement/PDF12. Academy promotional material/PDF11 is excluded. This is not an executed agreement or a facsimile read. One ordinary public GET returned403; the response bytes are retained as an error, never the guide's original. The successful reader is retained in priority-referral-guide.reader.txt. That route is closed, with no variant or retry.
The annual-report ordinary GET succeeded. Retained priority-ipo2023.html SHA256 is b7f1c94f0df2269776c32aeff112d2f7af7a3ee9da51c1f2046164b40486ab16. I read its complete Counter infringement section and period/publication/update blocks directly from the original. International visits and unrelated operations appearing in that section are not new findings. No whole annual-report read is claimed. The original, scoped extraction and scoped official-reader capture are distinct in priority-captures.json.
The August2025 original and2020 police-reader passages were reused locally from the accepted resources wave, not reacquired. Ten focused discovery queries covered exact Gateway/criteria, PIPCU priorities/conflicts/tasking and the exact Steering Group name, followed by the one permitted implementation paragraph. Search results for other police units, Creative, generic prioritisation frameworks, other local-authority intelligence gateways, corporate schemes and the operational form were not opened as substitute criteria. A police search result describing a2025 medicines case is discovery only, not a new case finding or proof the old exclusions were formally revoked. No current guide-adoption or Gateway scoring instrument was located in this finite pass. No branch follows before the combined forest.