Sport Wednesbury Scandal Latest!

What is going on at Jan Britton's Sandwell Council? There are large and highly expensive fraud investigations going on in respect of matters which have mostly occurred under the Chief Executive's "leadership" and even if actual fraud is not proven by the criminal standard of "beyond reasonable doubt" the matters in issue are quite clearly evidence of gross negligence/incompetence on the part of his SMBC staff.

For the full story on the ever-growing Sport Wednesbury scandal see the following posts but new evidence had now emerged concerning this murky affair as set out below:

http://thesandwellskidder.blogspot.co.uk/2015/07/mcvittie-takes-biscuit.html

http://thesandwellskidder.blogspot.co.uk/2015/07/sandwells-shafting-of-sport-england.html

http://thesandwellskidder.blogspot.co.uk/2015/07/sport-wednesbury-plot-thickens.html


Whatever happens the Labour Council's auditors need to take a look at this. A "normal" local police force should at least take a look but we know that there is no possibility of West Midlands Police investigating Sandwell Labour's affairs. (Having said that I was chatting with a DS from WMP last week and he has advised me to raise new complaints with WMP concerning certain issues and I will make an official complaint to them about this affair noting that even the BBC cannot get satisfactory answers from various interested parties. If anyone wants to join with me on this then please get in touch.)

I am not going to go over the ground set out in the above save where necessary.

The fact is that Wednesbury Celebrates allegedly applied for a huge Sport England grant although the bid was actually secretly prepared at taxpayers' expense by Sandwell Labour Council. The Council itself claimed it was putting in "matched funding" of taxpayers' money of over £18,000 and p*ss-pot "Wednesbury Celebrates" claimed it would put in £3,000.

Of course, two of the trustees of Wednesbury Celebrates are Labour Councillors Olwen Jones and Elaine Costigan.

Now Sport England appear to have dropped the proverbial b*llock here in that they did not ask for Wednesbury Celebrates' accounts before making the grant (I have been asking for these for some weeks now but Cllrs Jones and Costigan have not permitted me sight of them). They needed to be satisfied that Wednesbury Celebrates was a substantial organisation and that it was solvent.

Sport England's only "accounting" information was that, as at March, 2013, the TOTAL INCOME (ie excluding expenses) was a miniscule £8,000 per annum and with the benefit of hindsight they may well wonder why they did not ask why a tiny "social club" suddenly wanted a sports-related grant of over £200,000. Of course, elements in Sandwell Council were out to shaft them and no doubt they were very impressed with the professionalism of the Council-prepared application and with the Council itself and other organisations claiming to put in "matched funding". Sport England did not check, and were therefore unaware, that virtually all the people writing the letters were all connected in some way with either Sandwell Labour Council or with the Jones family. A particular egregious example was, of course, Cllr Ian Jones's (yes, husband of Olwen and father of Richard) letter on behalf of Wednesbury Water Polo Club offering as "matched funding" use of "their" pool when, of course, not only does the Club get money from Sandwell Labour but it also uses the, er, Council's pools for its activities!

But now the scandal deepens. As above, Sport England saw no accounts with the application but WERE given an HSBC bank account statement for Wednesbury Celebrates as at 14th November, 2013. This showed a cash balance of £10,577.10. Of course, this is totally meaningless as it is a sum of money shown at a particular moment in time and gives no indication whatsoever as to the liabilities of the secretive "Community Association". Sport England should never have accepted this in any event but more particularly because, just a fortnight or so beforehand, Wednesbury Celebrates had massively boosted its cash balance pre-application by banking a substantial cheque for £5,000 on 29th October, 2013. I don't suppose I need to tell you where the £5,000 came from do I? Well yes, you guessed it - Labour Sandwell Council!!!!!

Clearly, we need to know that Sport England were not deliberately deceived concerning the financial status of Wednesbury Celebrates and I regret to say that things get worse.

Not only did Sandwell Labour promise £18,720 of our money to this fiasco but Wednesbury Celebrates told Sport England that there would be matched funding of £9,360 in respect of room hire at "Wednesbury Town Hall" and you would have thought even Sport England would have realised that a building with that name was likely to be actually owned by the local council. But in news I broke via my Twitter account on Friday, Wednesbury Celebrates has "failed" to pay its rental of Wednesbury Town Hall to sleazy Sandwell Labour Council in any event!

Here questions need to be asked of Chief Executive ("lol"), Britton. We know Cllr Hussain has been intimately involved with mega-expensive property consultants, Jones Lang LaSalle, to allegedly increase income from Labour's crumbling town halls and, of course, the crafty comrades recently spent a shed-load of dosh on tarting-up the Wednesbury building. And so the public would, no doubt, imagine that hire money is now rolling in....

But insiders at the allegedly cash-strapped SMBC informed me that a very high-ranking officer in Britton's shambolic organisation has personally ordered that Wednesbury Celebrates should not be pursued for the outstanding rent - at I time when Labour are hacking frontline services and jobs!

Independent evidence obtained by a Freedom of  Information Request (which auditors KPMG will have to look at in their capacity as auditors and irrespective of their laughable "independent" investigation into the land sales etc) shows that, as at 31st July, 2015, Labour Sandwell had submitted these invoices to Wednesbury Celebrates - all on 9th March, 2015:

Apr-Jun 2014    £4,492.50;
Jul-Sep 2014     £4,855.75;
Oct-Dec 2014   £4,970.75;
Jan-Mar 2014   £6,517.50.

Total - a stonking £20,836.50 still unpaid nearly five MONTHS after the date of the invoices.

The first thing for very highly-paid Britton (and for auditors KPMG) to answer is why a Labour Council blaming "The Government" for having to make cuts did not actually invoice Wednesbury Celebrates for these four rental periods until March, 2015? What sort of incompetent governance led to SMBC not invoicing each quarter (it cannot be because the rent was payable annually in arrears - which would be a dubious arrangement anyway for a p*ss-pot organisation - since Britton's employees have belatedly raised four separate invoices).

The second question is why these invoices remain unpaid? If one of Britton's most senior lieutenants has said payment was not to be chased then why was this done and on whose authority was this decision taken? Did Britton himself know about this? If there has been no such order then it is the first day of the working week tomorrow and surely we are all entitled to ask that Britton gets off his arse and gets a cheque in the bank by 5pm?

The Freedom of Information reply makes no mention of SMBC submitting any invoice yet to Wednesbury Celebrates for the period April, 2015 to June, 2015. Is there a massive con going on here or is this yet more appalling slack governance by Britton's "team"?

If, Britton, it was never the intention that Labour SMBC would actually charge rent to Wednesbury Celebrates, why were four invoices raised near the end of the Council's financial year? I appreciate this is a relatively small amount in the overall Council budget but surely this would amount to false accounting? Is this an isolated example of this sort of thing happening?

Just when you think it can't get any worse it does!

You will see from the above that, as at the end of September last year, Wednesbury Celebrates owed the Labour Council six-months rent totalling around £9,348.25 although for the mysterious reasons outlined above no invoices had been raised. Was this deliberate since on 24th September, 2014 Jan Britton's staff authorised and duly paid Wednesbury Celebrates a further £5,000 (plus another £500 on 5th May, 2013 just four days before the above invoices were issued!) It is by no means clear, given what this blog has disclosed to date in respect of various matters, that there is not at least one employee at SMBC who is behaving fraudulently but if that is not the case here what on earth is going on? Are the systems that Britton oversees so lax that his staff are sending out cash payments to an organisation that owes it money! If it transpires that Wednesbury Celebrates is insolvent and it (or its trustees) cannot make good the losses then Britton's staff could have mitigated a huge loss to the taxpayer by £5,500 but for spectacular incompetence.

Are we to also read into this that all so-called "community organisations"/ charities in Sandwell are also to be allowed Council premises rent-free despite the cuts since April, 2014 or maybe it is just ones where Labour Councillors are involved?

There are questions for Sport England too. They have only paid out part of the grant and clearly need to be satisfied that all IS above board here before parting with more dosh. Is Wednesbury Celebrates solvent if it DOES have to pay the rent? If, on the other hand, a very senior officer of SMBC has indeed waived the debt, was Sport England told? Are they being actively deceived concerning the "matched funding" here? Surely they will need to obtain revised information at the very least!

So come on Britton! Your outfit spends over half a million pounds a year for a press office to keep tweeting about dog sh*t so lets have some real info for a change and the news that you have recovered this huge sum of unpaid rent for taxpayers and the people of Sandwell!

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