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Dozens of apparently independent people or organisations which have praised Ken Livingstone or attacked Boris Johnson have received large sums of taxpayers' money from City Hall, a Standard investigation has revealed.
Those paid include newspapers, individual journalists, pressure groups and companies.
The revelations, condemned by the London MP Greg Hands as a "disgrace", come as the Electoral Commission launches an investigation into earlier claims that Mr Livingstone used taxpayer-funded officials for party political campaigning.
The first major attack on Mr Johnson during the campaign came from Doreen Lawrence, mother of the murdered teenager Stephen, who told The Guardian newspaper that he would "destroy the city's [multicultural] unity".
Ms Lawrence did not declare that her organisation, the Stephen Lawrence Charitable Trust, has received at least £1.9 million from Mr Livingstone's London Development Agency to build a new headquarters in south-east London. The trust did not reply to inquiries by the Standard.
The following month, Mr Johnson was attacked, also in The Guardian, by John Sauven, director of Greenpeace, who accused him of "diplodocus rhetoric" and of "disappearing under the rising tide of environmental awareness".
Mr Sauven contrasted this with the "boldness" of Mr Livingstone, whose congestion charge, he claimed, "has delivered cuts in both pollution and congestion levels". In fact, after initially falling, both pollution and congestion have returned to their previous levels.
Mr Sauven failed to declare that Greenpeace has been paid at least £7,300 directly by Mr Livingstone and has also received substantial funding through the Mayor's London Energy Partnership. Greenpeace failed to return calls on the subject.
Mr Livingstone was also singled out for extravagant praise by another green organisation, Forum For The Future, which recently named him the third most important environmental leader in the entire world. Mr Livingstone's campaign website, Re-Elect Ken, has made strong play of the findings.
Forum For The Future did not declare that it has received at least £530,000 in funding from Mr Livingstone over the past five years. A spokesman for Forum For the Future insisted that the City Hall money had had "no impact" on their view of the Mayor.
Substantial Mayoral funding has also been paid to a number of groups which have sprung to the defence of the Mayor's race adviser, Lee Jasper, who is currently under police investigation.
After the Standard first revealed that organisations run by friends of Mr Jasper had received at least £2.5 million in public money, Mr Livingstone held a City Hall press conference to denounce the reports.
He was joined by the Rev Nims Obunge, of the Peace Alliance, who condemned the reports as "smears - killing the hopes and dreams of our young people". Mr Obunge's organisation has received at least £61,000 from the Mayor, £50,000 of which was directly signed off by Lee Jasper.
The normal audience at the press conference - professional journalists from the main London media - was heavily outnumbered by representatives from bodies which do not normally attend, including the 1990 Trust and the New Nation newspaper. They were heavily critical of the claims about Mr Jasper and made clear their support for him.
The New Nation, which bills itself as Britain's leading black newspaper, declined to cover the Lee Jasper story, instead leading on a story about Mr Johnson's "racism" that it had already carried three months before.
GLA accounts show the Ethnic Media Group, publishers of the New Nation and one other main newspaper, has been paid at least £400,000 by City Hall, ostensibly for recruitment advertising. However, according to GLA records, almost no one has ever been successfully recruited to a City Hall job from any advert in any Ethnic Media Group publication.
In the year 2001, for example, EMG received £79,000 worth of recruitment adverts from the GLA - only £7,000 less than the Guardian, the main newspaper for public-sector job adverts. The Guardian spend generated 935 applicants of whom 121 were shortlisted and 18 appointed. The EMG spend generated just 42 applicants of whom five were shortlisted and none appointed. The EMG currently receives £40,000 a year.
"The advertising spend is used as a direct tool by Jasper," said one black publishing executive in a rival business. "They give money to buy coverage or make sure certain issues aren't covered."
Mr Jasper paid a further £26,000 to be directed to the New Nation for a recent supplement detailing the top 100 most powerful black Britons. The supplement names Mr Jasper as the 10th most powerful black man in Britain and includes a two-page interview with him.
Michael Eboda, who has recently stepped down from the New Nation editorship, denied all claims of editorial influence, saying: "There is no love lost between us and the GLA. We've actually had a big issue with them because their advertising spend is something like a third of what it was five years ago. The reason we support Ken Livingstone editorially was more to do with the fact that we couldn't support Boris because of the things he's said."
Another writer, Guardian reporter Hugh Muir, received money from City Hall via a consultancy, Insted, for working on a report, The Search for Common Ground, a study on how the media covered Muslim issues, commissioned by the Mayor and published in November. Insted received at least £28,000 from the Mayor, of which an unknown portion was paid to Mr Muir.
Ten days ago, Mr Muir co-wrote a front-page story in the paper attacking Mr Johnson for an alleged conflict of interest. A Guardian spokesman said: "Hugh has written many articles both supportive and critical of Mr Livingstone and it is simply wrong to characterise his behaviour as inappropriate."
At least six signatories to an open letter published in The Guardian last month urging Muslims to vote for the Mayor also received money or benefit from him without declaring it in the letter.
They included the 1990 Trust, paid £171,000, the Lokahi Foundation (£450,000), the Muslim Welfare House (at least £47,000), the Muslim Weekly, which has received recruitment advertising, Yasmin Qureshi, who was Mr Livingstone's human rights adviser, and the Federation of Student Islamic Societies, which was given the free use of City Hall for its annual conference.
A spokesman for the Mayor's office said the issue "does not appear to be a GLA matter".
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Interesting that Greenpeace has been mentioned. Up to now I haven't been able to understand why they supported the congestion charge zone extension so uncritically, even though the environmental benefits might well not be very great in relation to the huge cost and management overheads. I would have thought at least they might criticise the huge number of exemptions allowed.
It may be OK for arts organisations to take money directly from government, but doing so must fatally compromise any organisation that aims to influence politics.
- Tode, London, UK
Livingstone as he is now known should be thrown out!
- Dave English, Surrey
Ken Livingstone's campaign said: 'The black community does not have to be paid to oppose someone who talks about "piccaninnies" or describes South Africa as the "majority tyranny of black rule", and similarly nor do green organisations have any difficulty in choosing between Ken and a Tory candidate who opposed the Kyoto Treaty, backs nuclear power, opposed the congestion charge, opposes a £25 charge for gas guzzlers like Chelsea tractors, and attacks the new Low Emission Zone.'
- Ken Livingstone Campaign, London
