Fraud , Bent Coppers & Wragges

Question 1 - has there been fraud at Labour Sandwell Council - answer yes.

Question 2 - who is the fraudster? Answer - at least one SMBC employee.

Question 3 - is there a bent copper in West Midlands Police protecting the Labour Council. Answer - it appears so.

Let us dig down into this a little further.

I cannot comment on the land deal involving Cllr Bawa as SMBC are refusing to answer a Freedom of Information request (FOI) until the "police investigation" is over.

Someone in WMP is blocking any investigation into how Cllr Rouf got a council house and how his son got to buy a much sought-after plot of land at Florence Road, Smethwick for much less than the Labour Council used OUR money to buy. The sale was ordered by 3 top [sic] councillors - Hussain, proven liar I. Jones and the talking corpse, Eling. They loaded the gun but someone has to fire it and the councillors ordered the "Area Director for Regeneration & Economy" (Nick Bubalo) to agree the terms and the "Director of Legal & Government  Services" (Neeraj Sharma) to do the legal stuff.

Despite SMBC having a valuation report on three disused public conveniences, Sandwell Labour sold them in 2012 for considerably less to a relative, by marriage, of Cllr Hussain. Sharma's department did the conveyancing.

In 2011, Neeraj Sharma's legal department lifted a restrictive covenant on land at the Plough Inn, Tividale Road, Tipton thereby greatly increasing its value. The happy beneficiary is a close personal friend of Cllr Mahboob Hussain. I cannot tell you any more about this as SMBC are refusing to answer a FOI request pending the outcome of the alleged "police investigation".

Sandwell Labour had imposed a restrictive covenant on property in Birmingham Street, Oldbury. This was the premises of the now defunct Sandwell Muslim Organisation in which Cllr Hussain was a leading light. Mr Bubalo has stated that he had "consultations" with Neeraj Sharma's legal department who helpfully decided that the covenant they - themselves - had drafted was, er, unenforceable! Sharma's department executed a deed of release and, as if by magic, in went a planning application to convert the property to 6 flats.

SMBC KNOW that one of Hussain's daughters owns a house in Oldbury as they have a legal charge on it but SMBC staff have given her a four-bedroom council house.

Cllrs Hussain, I Jones, Eling and homelessness expert, Simon "Two Homes" Hackett, agreed to sell the large plot at Lodge Street, Oldbury. The terms were to be agreed by the "Area Director of Regeneration & Economy" and the deal executed by the "Director of Legal & Government Services". It just so happens that Bubalo and Sharma then agreed to sell this land for just £145,000 to a SMBC employee who also happened to be one of the sons of Cllr Hussain and who also happened to work in Bubalo's own department. He is building 14 houses on the plot and unless he is very stupid indeed he will clear a profit of AT LEAST £1 million (one million pounds!) Not bad for an humble council employee.

In a notorious committee meeting in December, 2012, Labours Cllrs Hussain and Hackett ordered the sale of the old Coroner's Office in Smethwick. Nick Bubalo had already "estimated" a value. Once again, the task of selling the property was given to Bubalo and Sharma. Even though other parties were interested in this plot, Bubalo and Sharma again sold the land to their SMBC colleague, Azeem Hafeez - Hussain's son.

As well as being head legal honcho Sharma is also the Council's Monitoring Officer. In November, 2013 I specifically raised a query about Cllr Hussain's interest in Five Star Taxis of Dudley (he and his wife own half of the company). Sharma said she had a word with Hussain about this but he did not see fit to amend his register of interests which is odd because Five Star were tendering for a valuable contract with Sharma's Council and duly won a contract which has netted Five Star over £100,000 of OUR money. The question is whether Sharma knew at this time that Five Star were tendering for the contract? Happily, an officer of WMP has blocked any police investigation into this.

There is more but in the meantime there has been an expensive and long-running police fraud investigation into the Labour Council although at least one police officer blocked a number of lines of investigation. Who and why?

It is not always the case that brown envelopes have to change hands in fraud cases. When I had a lengthy meeting with the fraud team in November, 2014 I pointed out that whilst Labour were sacking large numbers of the Council workforce there may well be individuals within the Council who are biddable and prepared to act corruptly just to protect their jobs and status. Nevertheless, one is always led to believe in fraud cases that one should "follow the money" ie see who was the beneficiary of the bent deal in question.

In the case of Azeem Hafeez, and even though he will net over one million pounds from his two deals, the police went public to say that they are taking no action against him. There is a strange rumour circulating that the police did not actually trouble to formally interview him under caution but they won't say, of course (although I am putting in a formal complaint about the conduct of the investigation generally).

The police publicly say that Hafeez is in the clear and free to enjoy his hard-earned riches and so clearly there can be no question of him having supplied bungs to SMBC employees. Accordingly, it is difficult to see which employees have been enriched by these dodgy deals and so we come back to the question of whether staff have facilitated these transactions to preserve their jobs and status (and some employees of dubious talent are actually very highly-paid by their "socialist" masters).

Clearly it is inconceivable that Sharma and Bubalo are guilty of any criminality but how did they come to let their staff execute these deals on their watch and, sometimes, with their DIRECT involvement? How did they not see what was happening? It has got to be out of the ordinary for a Council to sell two valuable plots of land to one of its own lowly employees let alone one who actually works in one of the departments concerned. There is very obviously at least one rotten apple in the barrel but who is it? Why have Sharma and Bubalo and the audit teams not been able to identify the bent employee or employees? It can ONLY be a person or persons employed in either the Legal or Regeneration [sic] departments which narrows the field somewhat! As far as the Legal department is concerned there should be a clear paper trail showing EXACTLY who worked on each file.

Incidentally, I have asked Bubalo whether he has actually been interviewed by the police given his very close personal involvement in most of these matters but he had declined to say. Surely he MUST have strong suspicions as to who the fraudster is that will help the police "investigation"?

Of course, the police should have found this out but the story is that there has been a massive falling out within the Regional Fraud Team concerning this investigation and honest officers have allegedly been ordered not to investigate various issues. The word on the street is that the investigation is dead (although this has been specifically denied in writing by the new officer in charge of what is left of the investigation) but that the police are do absolutely nothing and simply waiting for the Wragge report (see below) to publicly close the investigation down.

We have known the rumour for sometime that an individual directly involved in a number of the above matters is widely-believed to be a police informant. We have also seen that high-ranking officers are very "close" to Labour SMBC. This does not necessarily imply impropriety but we have to ask whether it is leading to a lack of objectivity from senior officers. We still do not know (yet) why Supt Basit Javid was so keen on the deal to destroy The Public and to agree to award a multi-million pound contract to a company without tender or other competition. We still do not know who the SMBC employee was who enjoyed a "golf and spa day" with a senior WMP officer (he is refusing to say).

But there is a bent copper somewhere and it must be someone reasonably high-up to be able to pull the strings! It is not just stuff like the above. Look at the Cashmore situation. A formal complaint was put in years ago - immediately after she was elected - questioning her address. I do not know what secret access the police have to establish an address but, that aside, it would have been dead straightforward to have interviewed Cashmore and asked for household bills, bank accounts etc to check what address she was using in reality. They could have spoken to the school where her children were and to her neighbours. They could have checked what address she gave to her then employers. They could have checked social media (Cashmore quickly deleted a load of stuff on Facebook when I began to expose her false entries in the Register of Interests). Did they do any of this? No. They got a copper to phone her and ask to meet at the address she falsely claimed to be living at and when the meeting took place they said they were "satisfied" she was living there. Can you believe that? Even more incredibly, when I put in additional evidence to the police, including witness information, a police officer somewhere deliberately blocked any further investigation. I made an official complaint to WMP who said, I kid you not, that arranging to meet Cashers at the disputed address and making no further investigations whatsoever was perfectly appropriate! I appealed this to the Independent Police Complaints Commission who are referring the matter back to WMP. They say, effectively, that the pre-arranged meeting MAY have been appropriate depending on the state of knowledge of the investigating officer. As no other investigations had been made it will be interesting to hear what, precisely, his "state of knowledge" was! (Remember that Cashers received taxpayers' cash for four years and a company she omitted to say she worked for was contracting with Labour SMBC.)

There is a new Chief Constable in post and I am writing to him on the above and on the IPCC complaints which have been upheld by them. There seems to be a bent copper somewhere and let's hope he can expose him/her as well as tackling the substantive issues. I will keep you posted.....

And so we come to the Wragge Report.

Let us assume, for a moment, that we are dealing with a "normal" council rather that the fiasco presided over by Darren Cooper and Jan Britton (and I am working on the assumption here that this pair were asleep at the wheel and were just unaware of what was going on and not directly involved - although it should be remembered that Cooper is very close to one of the main protagonists and is also still refusing to say why he told a number of people that he got the money for his house extension from a well-known "Sadwell" figure).

You would think that Cooper and Britton would have wanted a full, independent, investigation into all this but Cooper (if he didn't actually know what had been going on - and how could he NOT know about the Rouf situation?) pre-judged the issue by immediately taking to his moronic Twitter account and pronouncing to the world that there was nothing untoward and that Hussain was a great man! He then specifically told people (and I have it in writing) that KPMG were being appointed to "investigate" the non-issue (as nothing was wrong). Way back in October, 2014 (in my best read post by a country mile) I pointed out the problems with this:

http://thesandwellskidder.blogspot.co.uk/2014/10/mahboob-hussain-audit-or-cover-up.html

To save you the time, KPMG are the Labour Councillor's own very highly-remunerated auditors. They had already failed to spot what was going on but Cooper claimed they would be investigating in conjunction with the Council's own internal audit department - who had also missed the blindingly obvious. I pointed out that neither internal audit nor KMPG were very likely to openly admit that they had spectacularly failed in their duties!

Of course, SMBC have been saying they cannot disclose any of this "because of the police investigation". But then the excellent Halesowen News broke the news that big-shot solicitors (not accountants) Wragge Lawrence Graham & Co (Wragges) had been appointed to provide a report! And they do NOT come cheap!

Hang on, say I? What happened to KPMG? I duly put in a FOI request only to be told - directly contrary to what Cooper had said - that NO report had been requested from KPMG who were merely carrying out their normal audit duties (no doubt with a keen eye for wrongdoing....)

Let me digress for a moment. My wife has a soft spot for Sadwell folk but despite the fact that there are some great folk dotted around the Borough there are also a large number of f*ckwits - not only the 30% who sustain the Labour Dictatorship and get sh*t on by Cooper & Co over and over again but the 70% who can't be arsed to vote at all and deserve everything they get (or don't get, to be more precise). Whilst 40 years of Labour failure has made the Borough one of the worst and most miserable areas to live in Britain the Dictatorship spout their anti-aspiration and anti-business claptrap. But the highly-paid senior management of the Council mostly choose to live outside the sh*t-hole that is Sandwell (and even the local Chamber of Commerce told the Council that business people wouldn't move to the "socialist paradise" because it was too ghastly).

Cooper, and people like the allegedly left-wing "buy to let" firebrand Cllr John Edwards, regularly abuse "the rich" and privileged and particularly private education (always amusing when the ludicrous Cooper tweets on this noting local Labour MP Spellar went to the same private school as Nigel Farage). The attraction of private education for the well-to-do is that one's offspring are spared having to rub shoulders with scum from the likes of Smethwick and Tipton. And the parents benefit too with nice little social gigs for parents like the one organised by Birmingham's "independent" school, King Edwards (KES) in February, 2012 called "KES in the City" - also a fantastic opportunity for "networking" and perpetuating elitism. But one person listed as a KES "parent" was one Neeraj Sharma of SMBC where she downing the canapes with a partner of, er, KPMG, a partner of old friends of Sandwell Legal Department, Bevan Brittan (who received colossal fees via the disastrous Sandwell BSF scheme), and no less than 8 (eight) employees of Wragges including three partners and the then Managing Partner.

Oh well you might say, it is no problem if Sharma and her ilk hob-nob with the "cream" of local society since they cannot obtain favours from Sandwell Council can they? Contracts have to be won via tender and everything is open and above board, isn't it? Now read on.

We have seen above that Sharma was specifically tasked with executing the dodgy deals set out above. We still don't know how she came to let these bent deals go through and, we have to assume, she simply failed to spot that there was (and maybe still is) a fraudster within the office. Given this oversight it would surely not be appropriate for Sharma to have any input in the commissioning of an allegedly independent report, save as a witness in any investigation?

I should have mentioned that Sharma had a less than glittering career with Walsall Council before bring her skill set to Sadwell. The poor governance and lack of control when she was "Head of Corporate Policy" there was heavily criticised in a damning report as detailed in an earlier post:

http://thesandwellskidder.blogspot.co.uk/2014/06/lessons-from-history.html

but the comrades obviously seemed to think this was no bar to a top appointment in the benighted Borough. There, and despite f*ck-ups of epic proportions like the above, the BT scandal, the CTB disaster etc etc, the absurd Cooper has recently PROMOTED her and given her a pay rise! She was on £128k a year (handy for those school fees) being salary of £108,499 plus pension contributions but Cooper has increased this to £114,187 plus pension - over £130k now.

This blog has been revealing with increasing regularity that Darren Cooper is repeatedly relying in what is called in law "a general power of competence" to override sensible safeguards in respect of contracts and procurement. There is a proper system in place within the Council to protect against obvious abuse but Cooper and his Cabinet colleagues routinely and unanimously vote that, in particular cases, the Council will simply ignore and override those rules. Cooper tried it and failed (so far) with the scandalous ice rink deal but succeeded with the bent Public deal and many others.Thus Cooper and cronies dole out sometimes multi-million pound contracts to people he and his chums happen to like, eg Interserve (nearly £6m in one case alone!). Having deliberately stopped anyone else from bidding for the work, Sharma and her colleagues then refuse to disclose the details via FOI requests saying the secret deals are "confidential"! A potential recipe for large-scale fraud in the future (if not already) if ever there was one! Furthermore, Sadwell Labour are deliberately ignoring a different legal duty which is to always secure "best value" for the taxpayer. I hereby invite Britton or Sharma to write to me explaining how they ensure "best value" when they have deliberately excluded everyone but Cooper and Co's "chosen ones" from those deals?

Back to Wragges. The land sale scandals were first exposed in this blog via the bog-gate scandal in August, 2014 but things hotted-up in shortly afterwards with my revelations about the bent Lodge Street deal. So why has it taken so long to commission an "independent" report anyway? Has it now been commissioned with a view to it exonerating two individuals so that they can rejoin the Labour Party? How "independent" is the report going to be? Who precisely commissioned it - was it Sharma herself despite her involvement (or, seemingly, lack of involvement) in these matters? How much is it going to cost?

I put in a FOI request on your behalf, of course, and Sharma herself has responded along familiar lines. Wragges, you will have guessed, did NOT have to tender for the work but the job was simply given to them by Jan Britton and/or his staff. And yes, Sandwell Council specifically made "an exemption" to the Procurement Rules yet again to gift the contract to Wragges - presumably on the direct orders of Cooper and his cronies. It is not clear whether Sharma herself was involved in the contract negotiations and it would be interesting to know whether any of the people on her canape circuit are involved in this deal. Don't get me wrong, Wragges are a "top" firm but they also come at a "top" price. How did "Sadwell" decide on the level of fees to be charged when they excluded everyone else from the deal? How does this constitute "best value" to the taxpayer?

Everyone knows that lawyers do have a nasty habit of dragging things out if they are not working on a fixed fee basis since they can keep on charging at a very high hourly rate. But Sharma is refusing to say what the deal actually is as it is said to be commercially confidential. It is NOT as everyone else was shut out of a one-off deal - it is just Sandwell Labour trying to keep things secret again!

The contract was from 1st April. 2015 (why was it left so long?). On 21st October, 2015 Sharma wrote to me saying the report was due in three months. That time has expired and Sharma now says the report should be available "in a few weeks".

(Of course, regular readers will know that Sadwell Labour also refused to release the Jones Lang LaSalle reports - which were also not put out to tender - on The Public. Worse, they contested the Ofsted report into Labour's disastrous Children's Services until the pre-election "purdah" period which they then used as the excuse to keep it under wraps until after last May's elections so that Sandwell folk couldn't see how useless they really are!) Incidentally, they also hired their own independent expert to report on the hopeless Labour f*ck-up, Professor Ray Jones, and he delivered a report which detailed the alleged improvements within Children's Services. Darren Cooper, Jan Britton and Cooper's (allegedly) mentally-ill social media spokesman all trumpeted the Jones Report with the imbecilic Cooper saying bring on Ofsted! Of course, SMBC duly received yet another disastrous "inadequate" rating but at least you taxpayers will be relieved to know that the comrades have only paid the good Professor £22,107.25* of our money so far!)

Messrs Wragge's are either incompetent (unlikely) of there is something else going on to delay the report. As above, PC Plod is sitting on his hands to await it (why - what the f*ck have THEY been investigating for 18 months?) and we cannot get the FOI replies until they drop out of the picture. And so there we are.....

Sharma claims that Labours new chums at Wragges will produce an "independent" report (even though "he who pays the piper normally calls the tune") before the election. But will WE see it before 5th May readers? Don't hold your breath!

THE SANDWELL SKIDDER - COMMUNITY NEWS - READ THE SKIDDER, KIDDER!

(AS TROLLED BY ANDREW HIPKISS!)

email  thesandwellskidder@gmail.com                   Facebook  Julian Saunders

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* £5,303 + £5,210.70 + £7.086.10 + £4,498.45