Tag Archives: David Ord

VENTURERS GAG DEMOCRACY

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bristol port

For years a Bristol City Councillor has sat QUIETLY, INEFFECTIVELY AND INCONSEQUENTIALLY as a non-executive director of the Merchant Venturer-run PORT OF BRISTOL COMPANY at Avonmouth. This councillor is supposed to protect our public investment in the firm as well as independently oversee the company, its finances and management to ensure it’s acting lawfully.

Now, at last, a councillor has stepped up and admitted that he QUIT this non-Exec role two years ago as he was PREVENTED from effectively overseeing the firm as the law requires and he was concerned this CONFLICTED with his responsibilities under the council’s code of conduct

Green Councillor Clive Stevens told a council scrutiny committee that the demand from the Port of Bristol Company that he sign a GAGGING ORDER preventing him from discussing any issues regarding the company shackled him from independently overseeing the company and conflicted with his primary role to be OPENLY AND DIRECTLY ACCOUNTABLE TO THE PUBLIC .

It also raises further questions. Like what the hell port owners, the scummiest of Merchant Venturer scum, David Ord “Ure” and “Tory” Terrence Mordaunt, think they’re doing NOBBLING DEMOCRATICALLY ELECTED REPRESENTATIVES AND INDEPENDENT NON-EXECUTIVE DIRECTORS of their firm? Or why our councillors have colluded with this legally dubious corporate management culture for years and why were they putting up with anti-democratic bullshit from a couple of wealthy Tory boys on the make?

The council’s Head of Legal Services has agreed to look at the matter and produce a report. Will he have learned anything from the 2008 banking crisis and the need for genuinely independent non executive directors TO PROTECT THE PUBLIC FROM THIEVING CORPORATE BASTARDS WITH NO MORALS?

We await the results with interest …

AVONMOUTH PLAGUE SHOCKER!!!

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We might have rid Avonmouth of human excrement but the the mayor and the Merchant Venturer’s plan to turn Avonmouth into a hell-hole unfit for human habitation continues apace as they now attempt to visit plague upon the area!

But let’s let everyone’s favourite independent council election candidate take up the story from here (and leave you to ponder what the actual representatives for the area do apart from bank cheques from the port company …)

From: s-norman123@hotmail.co.uk
To: mayor@bristol.gov.uk;
CC: zoe.sear@bristol.gov.uk
Subject: RE: plague of flies
Date: Thu, 15 May 2014

Dear George,

Once again I have to email regarding a new public health problem in Avonmouth created by your good old buddies and Merchant Venturer friends Mr D Ord and Mr T Mordant (aka the Bristol Port Company).

These being the very same people that you want to gift the freehold of the port to at a knock down price of £10 Million. It would appear that they have now begun with their master plan of polluting Avonmouth in the last 48 hours by infesting the area with flies – a carrier of bacteria & disease-causing organisms.

£10m is cheap at half the price to wipe out the human habitation in Avonmouth, Shirehampton and Lawrence Weston!

Now, let’s bring in to the equation overpaid environmental health officers who have – from the information I am currently receiving from local residents – been inundating environmental health with complaints. Moreover, it’s not just residents complaining but also a number of businesses.

The local residents are being told “Of Course We Will Come out and Fumigate Your Home”. Sounds great so far – just like someone selling you a place in paradise. But don’t be silly, we’re talking BCC here. So then comes the famous BCC catch phrase, “you will have to pay for this service”!

Can you or your officers please clarify why the residents should pay for the privilege of being infested by flies when it is a problem created by your good old buddies Mr Ord & Mr Mordant, people who are making millions from the port and causing nothing but misery to residents with their continued expansion into dangerous cargoes such as Biomass?

The infestation has been caused by biomass material stored and exported from N Shed, where in the last 36 – 48 hours a cargo has been loaded on to a ship. In view of the fact that BCC have a holding in Bristol Port Company with a Non-Executive Director could you ask your Merchant Venture Friends if they will be refunding the lease holder of the Avonmouth Tavern, Portview Road – which is closest to the facility ‘as the dust flies’ –  the £120.00 she has had to pay for two fly sapping machines and any loss of trade caused by this infestation?

I am also aware that the Miles Arms Public House had to seek fumigation yesterday and, in addition, the following business has had an infestation – the Royal Hotel on Gloucester Road. I am also being informed the local Health Centre and Costco Wholesale have been infested although I am not able to confirm this at this precise moment in time.

I think it would be prudent at this stage to bring in to the equation the biomass plant approved by BCC planners that the Bristol Port Company are going to allow Helios to build at the end of the eastern arm of the port. This will be using the same material currently being exported, which is causing the problem, only on a much larger scale. 850,000 tonnes per year – that’s a lot of flies.

Furthermore, going on information received I believe the unloading and storage facility will be close to the residential area of Avonmouth on the site of the old Co-Op Flour Mill which has recently been pulled down.

George, I think it is time for you to go on a jolly to Chernobyl and get that twinning certificate.

Will you or your office please clarify what your officers are doing to get this problem under control? May I also remind you flies lay little eggs and unfortunately it is not chickens that come out of them.

In light of this serious problem and the health issues created by such an infestation, will BCC waive all charges to local residents who contact environmental health seeking assistance? Maybe the Bristol Port Company will assist with these costs to the BCC environmental health budget?

Although I expect their answer will be buy fly killer or it’s not down to us.

I look forward to your immediate response in light of the misery this is currently causing local residents and businesses. Failing a satisfactory conclusion, a number of residents have informed me that they are quite prepared to put a fly infestation in to the offices of the Bristol Port Company and City Hall. Obviously this would take a little time as they would have to breed them from scratch.

Without wishing to sound facetious you are the divine power and can make this happen.

Yours Sincerely

Mr Stephen Norman

 

*********STOP PRESS**********

Bristol City Council Environmental Health have CONFIRMED the infestation has been caused by BIOMASS

NOTHING VENTURED, NOTHING GAINED… HOW BRISTOL’S COSY CLUB FOR RICH BUSINESSMEN KEEPS THE MONEY GOING ROUND

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A couple of examples emerge of just how charitable our old friends at the SOCIETY OF MERCHANT VENTURERS really are.

First, please step forward TIM ROSS who seems well-versed in that old Venturer trick of turning public money into private wealth.

Ross was, until June last year, Chairman of financial basketcase waste company MAY GURNEY (see The BRISTOLIAN #4.3 & 4.4), currently being rescued from financial collapse via a multi-million pound takeover by anti-union construction outfit, KIER GROUP. Indeed such are the financial problems at May Gurney that Bristol City Council has been discouraged from enforcing the penalty clauses in its waste collection contract with the company as it was thought it would bankrupt them and our rubbish could go uncollected.

However, bankruptcy is not something that’s likely to happen to Ross: once the ink was dry on May Gurney’s contract with the city council, he cashed in 100,000 of his shares in December 2011 to pocket A COOL £235,000 – conveniently before the share price of the company went south! He scarpered as Chairman of May Gurney six months later, just a few months before the share price tumbled below a pound.

Our second all-heart, all-charidee Venturer is CULLUM MCALPINE, scion of the civil engineering giant SIR ALFRED MCALPINE LTD, a firm that is never far from a tasty government contract or two. Cullum is a director of the company and has been personally named in papers lodged with the high court as being “intimately” involved in the operation of a “clandestine” organisation – The Consulting Association – holding a list of people barred from the construction industry. Or trade union blacklisting as it’s generally known.

The court papers claim, “McAlpine was the founding chairman at the [Consulting Association’s] inception in 1993. He was intimately involved in the foundation and operation of TCA. He formally offered Mr Kerr the position of director in August 1993. He finalised the written particulars of Mr Kerr’s employment, sending them to members for approval and obtaining legal advice in relation to them. He oversaw the arrangement of life and health insurance for Mr Kerr as part of his remuneration.”

IAN KERR was the director of The Consulting Association, the organisation which operated the ILLEGAL BLACKLIST OF WORKERS on behalf of big construction firms until he was exposed and prosecuted in 2009.

Perhaps Mr McAlpine should keep better company – as should the Society of Merchant Venturers.

AND ANOTHER THING …

Venturer DAVID ORD, co-owner of the Bristol Port Company at Avonmouth, has donated more than £330,000 to the Tory Party since 2005.

He was also one of forty donors to attend dinners with senior ministers, including the Prime Minister, in the last quarter of 2012.

So, did Ord use his access to ‘Dodgy’ David Cameron to lobby for the scrapping of plans for an electricity-generating Severn estuary barrage?