Skidder Shorts - No. 6 Revenge of The Turdmeister!

The Leader (sic) of Sandwell Metropolitan Borough Council (SMBC), Councillor Darren Cooper aka "The Turdmeister", "Sadim", "Pooper S-Cooper" & "The Turdfinder-General" (mostly in honour of the infamous "No Shit, Sherlock" dog-fouling poster fiasco) only fairly recently discovered that "Vernon Grant" is my nom de guerre and that I am Julian Saunders, husband of Linda Saunders who was, of course, the MD of The Public in West Bromwich.

Since that date, The Turdmeister has taken to using what he says is his "personal" twitter account, er, @sandwellleader to threaten to disclose Linda's redundancy payment to the world at large - not anyone else's - just Linda's. He was at it again just yesterday!

He also threatened, via Twitter, to do a Freedom of Information Act request to his own Council for this private information and, strangely enough, up popped just such a request  to SMBC from someone apparently called "J Shephard"! All very odd.

But, as any fule kno, Linda was not employed by SMBC but by Sandwell Arts Trust ("SAT"). Indeed, here is a section from "The Fundamental Review" (sic) - Cabinet agenda item 7 - of 16th October, 2013:

1.7 Under the existing Management & Services Agreement with the Sandwell Arts Trust which was entered into in 2009, The Council has certain contractual and financial responsibilities with regard to the wind-up of the Sandwell Arts Trust. These include redundancy and pension liabilities for SAT employees."

And who chaired this meeting - yes, you guessed it, The Turdmeister himself!

Quite why Pooper S feels the need to find out this information and broadcast it publicly is for others to question. Some may consider it a form of bullying or harassment but I couldn't possibly comment (yet!).

Points of Order:

1. Linda and those other SAT employees who were entitled to redundancy payments received the amounts they were entitled to under the local authority scheme as operated by SMBC - not a penny more, not a penny less:

2. It is not for me to speak on Linda's behalf but I will venture to say with 100% certainty that she would rather be leading her brilliant team in delivering a fantastic arts provision to the people of Sandwell and beyond these school holidays than simply having a few quid in the bank.

THE SANDWELL SKIDDER - A COMMUNITY BLOG

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