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Comment - Neither Ken nor the LDA has been able to answer a single one of our questions
Andrew Gilligan11.12.07
On Thursday 29 November, the Standard submitted a list of detailed questions to the London Development Agency and, the next day, to the Mayor about a number of grants which have been causing deep concern to some of its officials.
In total, more than £2.5 million has been paid by City Hall to organisations run by friends or business associates of the Mayor's adviser, Lee Jasper - with very little indeed, and sometimes nothing at all that we can trace, to show for it.
We asked, among other things, what outcomes these organisations had produced for the taxpayer.
We asked what audits had taken place of their grants. We asked how much Mr Jasper had been involved in the decision to pay their grants.
We gave the GLA nearly a week to respond before publishing our story, which ran to more than 2,000 words and was based almost entirely on sources such as company documents, London Assembly answers, taped, on-the-record interviews and leaked emails.
I (and a lot of other people) have found it deeply telling that, in nearly a fortnight, neither the LDA nor the Mayor has been able to answer a single one of our specific questions about these grants, instead launching a series of shrill ad hominem attacks on me and on the Evening Standard, of which today's is merely the latest and the shrillest.
As far as I can tell, the only one of our allegations that they have even denied is the fact that there is a GLA investigation into Mr Jasper.
But the Standard has a letter from the chief executive of the GLA, Anthony Mayer, dated October 30, to a London Assembly member, in which he promises to "investigate" Mr Jasper.
Mr Mayer now claims that this promise does not constitute a formal "investigation," but this is surely hair splitting. What the Mayor and his supporters seem to be saying today is that it is not permitted to question any grant ever given to any black organisation, or the behaviour of any black public official, and that to do so constitutes racism.
It doesn't, of course. The target of our investigations is not the black community. It is those organisations around the Mayor which siphon off money that should have been spent on the black community. Organisations which we now know for certain represent almost nobody in the community except the Mayor, his advisers, and their political friends.
In the last few days, those organisations have called down fire and brimstone upon the Standard.
Their websites have urged mass emails, calls and letters to us to protest at our outrageous slurs on them. What we have received is a greater proportion of calls, emails and letters from the black community thanking us for our work and - more importantly - offering extremely useful new information.
It is presumably to fend off the full investigation which must now be almost inevitable that Mr Livingstone has launched his diversionary attack today.
Like any politician in trouble, Ken wants to make the media the issue, rather as the Government tried to do during the Iraq war. Please don't be diverted by it, and do keep watching for further developments on the real story.
Reader views (2)
Andrew Gilligan deserves the Pulitzer Prize for exposing the scandal at the heart of City Hall, with the Mayor defending his cronies because when one goes down he will surely have to follow in a domino effect. I urge Andrew Gilligan and the investigation team to keep up the pressure on the Mayor and Lee Jasper.
- Damon Silk, London, U.K.
I am a black business woman that applied to the LDA last year for funding to create a creative hub in Woolwich and did not get it as the LDA premises in WOOLICH ROYAL ARSENAL is not of benefit to me, a local business person.
They still have vacant office premises by the way…and have done so for the past 2 years – no kidding!
I say other investigations are undertaken i.e the £120million wasted and the other payments of costs.
In not calling for an inquiry into allegations of Mayor Ken's own wastage and the LDAs funding policies on the whole - a case of swallowing a camel and straining at a gnat!
- Elizabeth Obisanya, Thamsemead
