Jan Britton's £16m Big Black Hole!

It gets more incredible by the day....

Herewith a letter which I am sending to the Chief Constable of the West Midlands and to The Secretary of State for Communities and Local Government:

To: Dave Thompson, Chief Constable,
West Midlands Police

BY HAND

Cc The Rt. Hon. Sajid Javid MP, Secretary of State, Communities & Local Government

Dear Chief Constable,

Huge “error” in Sandwell SMC accounts.

For many years a former employee of Sandwell Council has made public allegations of a substantial fraud when SMBC entered into the absolutely disastrous “Transform Sandwell” contract with BT.

When I personally gave evidence to WMP about fraud in Jan Britton’s Council over many years I discussed this with DS Wayne Haynes and his colleague and urged him to meet with the former employee. It seems that - as with most other things - this was never followed up (and, of course, one or more senior WMP officers have seen to it that matters within the rotten borough have never been investigated either adequately or at all.)

You will probably be aware that there has been serious disquiet in other local authority areas relating to similar BT contracts eg in Cornwall and Liverpool and some police investigation.

You will also be aware that a Council is legally obliged to “balance the books”.

At present, only the unaudited accounts are on the SMBC website at present for 2016/17 but they contain the following extraordinary entry without explanation at paragraph 34 on page 87:

“A Review of the Capital Financing Requirement for 2016/17 identified that entries totalling £15.770m in relation to the previous BT contract had been excluded in error during 2011/12.”

Accordingly, during the period allegations of fraud were said to have occurred nearly £16m mysteriously disappears from the accounts. Unbelievably the alleged “error” was then not spotted for several years either by Jan Britton’s out of control staff or by the incredibly highly-paid external auditors, KPMG!

This requires immediate police investigation.

It should also be noted that three (Labour) councillors have informed me that Leader Steve Eling and Chief Executive Jan Britton are sacking “everyone who knows anything” that has gone on (and I have just been informed of another casualty). Sandwell are spending millions of pounds of taxpayers’ money on pay-offs for these staff and forcing them to sign confidentiality agreements but, of course, they have no effect in a criminal investigation. The danger is, however, that along with staff, documents will disappear too - particularly noting the shambolic governance of the Council.

I am copying in the Rt. Hon. Sajid Javid MP both in his capacity as Secretary of State since surely consideration must be given to putting Sandwell in “special measures” and because he is my MP and, as a taxpayer, I am alarmed that the Council is still forking out huge sums of public money to buy silence (a subject upon which we have already had correspondence.)

No doubt Mr Javid will be very concerned that the Labour Council have been seeking to extend KPMG’s contract given the above. Of course, given what has been happening under the corrupt regime it is possible that bent staff somehow managed to deliberately deceive KPMG for some years but this is a very significant sum of money for “Big Four” accountants to have allegedly “missed”.

Yours faithfully,

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

No phone number at present - please use email.                Facebook:  Julian Saunders

Email:  thesandwellskidder@gmail.com