The Solicitor's Regulatory Authority (SRA) has made the extraordinary decision that multiple racist comments by a Solicitor are no more culpable than a single outburst. It has refused to consider further evidence concerning former Gowling WLG partner, Mark Greenburgh, following an initial disciplinary finding for which the errant lawyer received only the very slightest smack on the wrist.
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| "No Profit From Racism" Demo at the offices of Gowling WLG |
Background
In 2015 the deeply corrupt Labour Sandwell Council (currently in Government "special measures") tried to head off a police fraud investigation by appointing "independent" Solicitors to "investigate" a number of issues and prepare a Report. Jan Britton, the now-disgraced and dismissed Chief Executive*, had long standing connections with Wragge and Co's., Birmingham Office (the firm has changed its name and now operates as Gowling WLG) and gave them a £100,000 contract for the job without troubling to put the matter out to tender and even though Wragge's had lost an ongoing contract for services with bent Sandwell, which had been awarded to a firm miles from the West Midlands - Ashfords in Exeter!
[The eventual Report is widely known as "The Wragge Report" and I shall call in by that name.]
Britton was a pathetic lackey beholden to his political masters. Members of the Labour Party, including (then) Deputy Leader, Tom Watson (incredibly, soon to be "Lord Watson") and Gurinder Josan, a current member of Labour's NEC, wanted a Muslim Labour Councillor, Mahboob Hussain, kicked out of the Council and the Labour Party. Britton was only to happy to kowtow and appointed Greenburgh - a self-proclaimed Zionist - to investigate Hussain.
[A later investigation, The Cox Review - see further below, concluded that Britton broke the procurement rules with this appointment and then the financial regulations by failing to use the proper channels to pay Wragges's!]
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| Cox Review Summary (Part) |
Britton went on to agree further payments to Wragge's who clocked up fees of £180,000. The eventual Report was almost unreadable and serious questions were raised about the quality of the investigation - some of which were aired in the High Court. They are not relevant to this piece but will be partly dealt with in Part II.
Nearing the end of the investigation Greenburgh referred to the disability of Cllr Hussain's daughter and her children which he claimed was due to "inbreeding" within their "Community". Britton told the High Court that this vile comment was a "quip", but this racist comment was referred to the SRA by the victim and by me.
I heard nothing from the SRA and was completely unaware that they had only given Greenburgh a mild "rebuke". The public confirmation of this made no mention whatsoever of the racist nature of the appalling comment. I duly wrote to the SRA but they wrongly told me that the matter had been dealt with by the Solicitors Disciplinary Tribunal, and so I wrote to them:
"I was told that he [Greenburgh] received a "smack on the wrist" but only recently became aware of your decision from June, 2018. I was horrified that although my specific complaint was about his racist comment this was totally excluded from the ... decision.
As it happens, Sandwell Council have unearthed what they say is further racist abuse by Greenburgh although they are currently trying to suppress the Report.
I am outraged that this racism has been covered up by the legal establishment. I also asked what the ethnic make-up of the [panel] was?"
Having been referred back to the SRA I asked the same questions and added:
"How did the central and very serious allegation come to be airbrushed from the original complaints? Were those at the SRA who made the decision all white?
Further, Cllrs Maria Crompton and Rajbir Singh, political "leaders" of SMBC in recent times are deliberately suppressing a further Report [The Cox Review] clearly stating that Mr Greenburgh's comment was not an isolated outburst but just one of a series of such vile comments.
As before, once the current Council leader, Cllr Singh, finally desists from the attempted cover-up and makes the latest Report public, it is inevitable that the comments will be the basis of further complaints to the SRA and so it is important for public confidence in your organisation that you are seen to be dealing with these issues objectively and without an institutional racial bias."
The SRA invited me to submit further complaints if applicable and, without identifying the ethnicity of the panel who provided the mildest of rebukes to Greenburgh, they did assure me that "our panel is representative of gender and ethnicity."
A series of Labour Leaders at bent Labour Sandwell have suppressed the release of The Cox Review. Bizarrely the supposedly independent auditor of the Council, Mark Stocks of Grant Thornton, took it upon himself to enter the political fray, and he has actively encouraged Labour to suppress the Report and the allegations of racism. The current Leader, Kerrie Carmichael, even lied at a full Council meeting that she didn't even know what The Cox Review was.
- Suggested to Sandwell staff that all people with"Muslim names" mentioned in his so-called "investigation" were "related" to Cllr Hussain;
- When two Muslims purchased a closed-down pub to open a restaurant he commented that they were obviously happy "The Koran allowed Muslims to buy pubs";
- Repeated the same slur to a witness (actually in a formal interview) that it was inappropriate for Muslims to buy pubs because of their religion;
- Made adverse comments about the age gaps between the children of Cllr Hussain's daughter suggesting a deliberate link to Council House allocation;
- Suggested that at a time when the daughter was estranged from her husband she had "an immaculate conception"and then suggested that by reason of her religion she may not have had a "choice" in whether she had children.
This was all "new" information which Labour and Grant Thornton are very anxious to conceal. I duly reported the matter back to the SRA, but they have declined to take any further action:
The SRA says that had the additional information been known at the time of the first rebuke for the "quip" it would not have led the SRA to impose heavier sanctions! There is no right of review.
And there we have it. The first - and vilest - racist remark was dismissed by Jan Britton as an isolated quip. The SRA made no mention whatsoever of the racist nature of the remark in its publicly-released finding, but meekly suggested that it was "capable of causing offence". When further evidence - which had been deliberately concealed by the Labour Council for some years - clearly shows that this was NOT an isolated example of racism the SRA simply shrugs its shoulders and says, "so what"?
Because of the concealment of the further information the original and feeble SRA rebuke is now time-barred and has disappeared from their website. A member of the public looking to instruct Greenburgh has no way of knowing about his past racist slurs.
Greenburgh now runs his own firm and boasts that he has advised on a range of equality issues including "disability, race, sexual orientation, and transgender discrimination cases". Incredibly, he has been appointed as a Director of a charity, The Diversity Trust, whom one might imagine are supposed to be against the sort of stuff an official report says he said. Like many in the legal profession Greenburgh is positioned right in the heart of the Establishment. If his above CV is not shocking enough, The Diversity Trust boasts that he is - wait for it - also "a co-opted member of the City of London Corporation Standards Committee". What a sick country this is!
There have been at least two anti-racism demonstrations outside the offices of Gowling WLG (and one outside the offices of Grant Thornton) - see picture above. The Partners of Gowling WLG have been invited to repay the £180,000 to the taxpayers of Sandwell or to a Muslim Charity, but they have decided they would prefer to profit from racism instead.
* Unusually in the world of Local Government Jan Britton was kicked out of Sandwell without compensation. He had, inter alia, conspired with Labour Councillors to rig a Council Standards Investigation. Further, he and another employee colluded in respect of their evidence at a criminal trial and then lied in Court. Happily for him, West Midlands Police - the employers of his son - declined to prosecute him for perjury. But Publica Group - which runs four small Councils in Oxfordshire and Gloucestershire - decided this CV made him the perfect candidate to run those bodies. You couldn't make it up.
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