The brilliant Private Eye magazine Rotten Boroughs column features Basildon Council in the current edition. With no party having overall control. Reform and the Tories are running the show. They have appointed the appalling Mark Greenburgh as Interim Monitoring Officer despite his history working for one of Britain's worst councils - Sandwell. Incredibly, given his track record, he has been handed total power over standards investigations.
A spokesperson for Basildon told Private Eye that Greenburgh has a clear disciplinary record with the Solicitors Regulation Authority (SRA). Up to a point, Lord Copper. In fact, Greenburgh was rebuked in 2018 for making a racist "quip" that a Muslim Councillor's daughter was disabled due to "inbreeding" within the Muslim community. Here is the proof:
The SRA kindly clears the record of errant solicitors so that records of wrongdoing after three years. One person petitioned the SRA about this in the case of Greenburgh on the basis that there should be no time limit on racism. And so Basildon may genuinely unaware of Greenburgh's run-in with the SRA but they could have found out a lot about him by googling this blog.
If you google "The Sandwell Skidder + Wragge Report" you will find numerous stories about Greenburgh. Briefly, he was a crony of Jan Britton from Buckinghamshire Council days. Britton became the disastrous Chief Executive of (then) bent Labour Sandwell Council (currently Reform, at least for a few weeks). [Britton was later kicked out in disgrace, but in the sick world of local government found highly-paid work with other local authorities.]
Back in the day, and primarily thanks to fraud disclosures in this blog, the police started an investigation into a councillor and his son (an employee of the Council). Labour did the trick of "buying off" the cops (with whom they enjoyed a corrupt relationship) by setting up an "independent investigation" (see further below). This resulted in Britton appointing his pal Greenburgh from solicitors Wragge & Co (now Gowling WLG). Greenburgh, and a Wragge colleague, produced a terrible,shoddy, report - popularly known as "The Wragge Report" which is in the public domain. But it worked. The police dropped their "investigation" and, whatever his misdeeds may have been, the councillor was found to have breached the Councillors' Code of Conduct in a ludicrous show trial which would have made Stalin blush. [All was later forgiven by bent Labour and the councillor's son - who had left the council by then - was given a massive chunk of a SEND taxi contract in highly controversial circumstances.]
Tom Watson MP (now Unelected Legislator Watson) had prepared a dossier on the Muslim Councillor and with the support of (then) fellow MP, the greaser John Spellar (now Unelected Legislator Spellar) it was decided to shaft him. They had their pathetic rimmer, Gurinder Josan (now an MP) meet with the writer on three occasions to collate information. The grovelling Jan Britton appointed his mate to write the report and when Greenburgh made the infamous racist comment Britton dismissed it as just a "quip". But, later, Sandwell conducted a further investigation into Britton and Greenburgh - "The Cox Review"which Labour has refused to this day to make public - with the connivance of Grant Thornton, accountants. Happily this blog obtained a copy and published it.
At the time of his appointment Greenburgh boasted of being a Zionist but this didn't stop Britton setting him on the Muslim Councillor. The Cox Review found that Britton had not used proper procedures to appoint his mate to a valuable contract, and failed to use the proper systems to pay Wragges so as to conceal the level of the payments. Importantly, there was evidence in the Review of further racist and inappropriate comments by Greenburgh so that Britton's claim that the racism was a one-off "quip" was also called into doubt.
This blog went back to the SRA with the new evidence in The Cox Review since Greenburgh had previously only been dealt with for the "isolated quip". The SRA refused to take further action on the basis that several racist remarks were no worse than a single racist "quip"! The full story of this referral can be found in detail via this link:
https://thesandwellskidder.blogspot.com/2021/08/gowling-wlg-racism-scandal-rolls-on.html
Despite the racist remarks Greenburgh went on to work with the, wait for it, Diversity Trust. Despite (a) the shoddiness of the Wragge investigation and report, and (b) the racist of their own partner, Wragge's refused to repay the sums the taxpayer had paid them prompting an anti-racist demo outside their offices. [The same demo also gathered outside the offices of Grant Thornton given its part in Labour's cover-up of the racism.]
And here is The Cox Review which bent Labour have tried to conceal. Employers of Greenburgh and Britton should take a careful look at this!
https://thesandwellskidder.blogspot.com/2022/02/here-it-is-folks-cox-review-revealed.html
(As above searches will find a number of other articles about the Wragge Report and Cox Review.)
Finally - READ PRIVATE EYE and READ THE SKIDDER, KIDDER!
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