Evidence of council corruption is against the law claim idiot duo in desperate corruption cover-up
The statement below from a member of the public was banned from being read at Full Council by Green Mayor, Yassin “Lord Haw Haw” Mohamud, on the advice of interim legal boss Nancy “Rollercoaster” Rollason, one of the, er, subjects of the statement. This pair of chumps claim it is “defamatory”.
Please urgently send all legal correspondence to bristoliannews@gmail.com. We are looking forward to receiving it.
STATEMENT:
More or less 4 years ago to the day, I wrote, together with another member of the public (Ms Joanna Booth) to the Council’s external auditors (Grant Thornton) to request a Public Interest Report on matters relating to Stepping Up (a DEI leadership programme founded by then Deputy Mayor, Asher Craig and her associate “Prof” Christine Bamford). We were both concerned at the content of Freedom Of Information requests obtained in respect of the procurement and contractual arrangements for Stepping Up.
A year later in October 2023 I received a response from Jon Roberts, then partner at Grant Thornton. Given my knowledge of the Stepping Up programme, and my own professional experience as an auditor, I felt that this response was wholly inadequate and did not reflect the gravity of the issues affecting Stepping Up. I made a formal complaint to Grant Thornton regarding their work.
Another year passed and in October 2024, Grant Thornton partially upheld my complaint in a number of respects and produced a few paragraphs to include in their annual audit report for the Council.
It was at this stage that members of Audit Committee voiced their concerns regarding the apparent mismatch between public knowledge (from FOIs, as reported to Audit Committee Public Forum by myself and others) and the scant reporting by the external auditors. This then led to the events mentioned at Agenda Item 8.
A delay of a year in responding to Mr Jo Lloyd’s FOI request means that we are now 4 years down the line from the initial request to Grant Thornton for a Public Interest Report. A request that has been denied and will not be fulfilled.
Para 4.38 of Agenda Item 8 states: “the Council’s external auditors were not provided with a copy of the (26 April 2023 Internal Audit..) report during their investigations in to the programme.”
For clarity, I repeat that I first wrote to the external auditors in 2022. They were carrying out work on Stepping Up in 2023. In other words, contemporaneous with the Internal Audit work and report. Any work carried out in 2024 by external audit was a result of my complaint about their initial work. Grant Thornton worked on my concerns for 2 years and still failed to come across this report.
In his October 2023 response to me, in which he rejected a Public Interest Report, Mr Roberts concluded: “..the Council has not identified any non-compliance with procurement rules in relation to the Stepping Up programme. Our review of the Council’s procurement register has also not identified any breaches”…
“We have also observed that due diligence was undertaken in relation to the original contract procurement for the programme.”
“The Council’s legal officers were involved in the initial procurement and provided recommendations into the type of agreement and to support clear documentation of the contractual relationship and fee structure. The legal team have confirmed that their advice was accepted and followed.”
“In summary, we have not therefore identified any matters regarding the governance arrangements for the Stepping Up procurement that would warrant consideration for reporting in the public interest.”
We know that these statements are untrue: as demonstrated by Grant Thornton’s later report in 2024 and from the Internal Audit Report itself.
Grant Thornton noted in their 2024 report that key contractual documents were missing. Instead, it appears, that Grant Thornton relied heavily on conversations with officers, including the legal team, to produce their October 2023 rejection of a Public Interest Report.
Who were the “legal officers” misleading Grant Thornton? Why were they doing this? Why were Grant Thornton taking statements made by BCC officers at face value, and not seeking appropriate audit evidence?
In addition, Mr Roberts states that his work was based on “discussions with Council legal officers, including the Monitoring Officer”. If this was the case, then why did the Monitoring Officer at the time (Mr Tim O’Gara) fail to disclose the existence of the Internal Audit report? Mr O’Gara was a recipient of the report, as documented in the FOI copy. This is a very serious matter.
Was the Monitoring Officer seeking to mislead the external auditors by omitting to mention the existence of the Internal Audit report? Grant Thornton were well aware of my concerns about the integrity of the Monitoring Officer (Tim O’Gara ) and Head of Legal Services (Nancy Rollason) regarding a members’ conduct complaint I had made. These concerns were upheld by the Local Government Ombudsman.
In addition I became aware that the Monitoring Officer and Head of Legal Services had unlawfully appointed Independent Person(s) to the complaints process. My complaint was also related to Stepping Up.
We need a wholly independent investigation into Stepping Up to include Bristol City Council, Bristol Waste Company and West of England Combined Authority. The possibility of fraud by the “pass through” payment of invoices by Bristol Waste Company for a private company (Stepping Up development Education Ltd, of which “Prof Christine Bamford is director) has still not been taken seriously by the auditors.
The public have been let down by officers at all levels and by both Internal and External auditors. As the ex- Director of Finance said after dealing at length with the tortuous attempts to keep Stepping Up afloat with £700k +runaway costs : “Lessons Must be Learned”.
Those lessons need to be learned and they need to be learned in the full light of public scrutiny.
