Skidder Shorts #42 - Grant Thornton Shocker, Part 1

 Explanatory Note:

Grant Thornton are the external auditors of bent Labour Sandwell Council and recently prepared an explosive report into certain aspects of the chain of disasters the comrades have inflicted upon the benighted Borough.

This is the first of a short series of vignettes dealing with another Labour sh*tshow.

Part One: Providence Place

This blog was the first media outlet to identify the unfolding Labour disaster at Providence Place, the large square office building near the new West Brom Building Society HQ and north of the West Brom Tesco. Indeed it featured in The Skidder's "Corruptour" - a coach trip visiting just some of the spots where Labour have had your pants down. (Incidentally, the Corruptour was the first ever in the UK encouraged with the kind permission of the originators of the idea in Mexico City!)

Grant Thornton were not auditors at the time and so are too polite to comment on the original SMBC deal with Sandwell. Labour boasted, of course, that it was the best thing since sliced bread when, of course, BT had shafted these morons royal. The deal was an absolute dog and that's without the allegation that £15m went "missing" before the ink was dry on the contract.

Of course, bent Labour then had to extricate itself from this disaster, at considerable expense to you and me.

This blog pointed out in 2014 that the so-called "socialists" ended up buying the building at over £20m bragging that they had purchased "a valuable asset" lol!

Again, this blog reported that Labour were actually on course to make a colossal multi-million pound loss for us taxpayers. Mark Stocks of Grant Thornton attended at Oldbury Council House and told a Committee they should urgently reconsider a planned deal to sell it for use as a music school run by the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra (paid for by the Dep't for Education - DfE). He looked extremely foolish when an apparatchik piped up to say that contracts had already been exchanged at a knockdown price! It was all too little, too late.

The Skidder was only wrong on the size of the loss which is even worse than I reported. Here's the full horror story via Grant Thornton:

"A receipt of £8.46m was generated from the sale of Providence Place to DfE which was significantly below the acquisition price a £23.558m in 2014.

"The Council is still committed to making the loan and interest payments related to the initial purchase. The total remaining loan and interest are £31.69m. In effect the the total loss to the Council is [around] £22.5m. This is a significant loss."

I am running out of synonyms for "boasting" but the Labour bullsh*tters attempted to justify yet another "back of an envelope plan" by claiming that this disaster would bring "prestige" to the sh*thole Borough! ROFLMAO! The moronic comrades are also desperate to try and pose as some sort of patrons of the arts after Dickhead Darren Cooper's "Year Zero" where most arts funding was stopped for several years because, as he put infamously put it, "the arts are sh*t".

It is hard to imagine this getting any worse, but hang on in there folks. At the end of long commercial leases the outgoing tenant usually pays "dilapidations" to the landlord. In simple terms, this is a payment for any repair work work to damage or wear on tear during the tenancy and can be a significant sum. BT still leased part of the building and so the desperate comrades, incapable of running a whelk stall, waived these payments and, wait for it, even PAID BT over £400,000 plus legal costs to bugger off! Once again, here it is from the horse's mouth:

"BT held a lease until 2026 and had no contractual obligation to move. On 6th June 2021 Cabinet agreed to the terms of BT surrendering their lease at Providence Place. These terms included the Council having no obligation to provide BT with alternative accommodation, the Council would pay BT a surrender premium equivalent to one years rented £446.4k + VAT, BT would be waived  liability for dilapidation and decommissioning works and the Council would be liable for BT's legal costs for surrender."

There will be many on the fiddle when the orchestra school moves in, but it looks like Labour have been playing you for fools for several years.

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