Communities Secretary Eric Pickles has said he will “carefully examine the evidence” gathered in a Panorama investigation into the mayor of Tower Hamlets council, who it alleges doubled grants awarded to Bengali-run charities in return for votes.
In a statement today Pickles said: "There is a worrying pattern of divisive community politics and mismanagement of council staff and resources by the mayoral administration in Tower Hamlets. I will be carefully examining the evidence provided by Panorama's thorough investigation and will consider the appropriate next steps, including the case for exercising the legal powers available to me."
Tower Hamlets mayor Lutfur Rahman has denied all of the allegations levelled at him by BBC Panorama. He says the programme is being used for political campaigning and electioneering purposes weeks before local and mayoral elections in May.
He says: “A dossier passed to us by a BBC whistleblower has revealed it to be in total breach of the BBC’s editorial guidelines as a public broadcaster. It has clear racist and Islamophobic overtones targeting the Bangladeshi Muslim community in Tower Hamlets.”
He also says the BBC and undercover production company Films of Records have been referred to the Information Commissioner and that a criminal investigation is underway.
The BBC has denied these claims. A BBC spokesperson said: "The mayor’s claims are not true. There is no criminal investigation. We voluntarily notified the Information Commissioner after we discovered that a researcher had taken confidential information held by the programme-makers and provided it to the mayor's office. We strongly reject any suggestion of racial, religious or political motivation in the making or broadcast of Monday’s programme, which investigated matters of legitimate public interest regarding an elected official.”
The East London Advertiser reports that a Bangladeshi journalism student working for the BBC leaked Panorama’s sources to Lutfur Rahman.
Grants for electoral support
The BBC Panaroma programme alleged that Lutfur Rahman, the Bangladeshi mayor of Tower Hamlets, has more than doubled funding recommended by officials for Bengali-run charities.
It said that opposition councillors believed the grants were made in return for electoral support.
Rahman has been mayor of Tower Hamlets since 2010, and is the borough’s first directly elected Asian mayor. He won as an independent with 13 per cent of the vote.
BBC Panorama reported that Labour and Conservative councillors allege that his selection of charities for grant funding in the run-up to the election was motivated by electoral advantage.
Labour councillor Joshua Peck told the programme: "He doesn't have a political machine and he needs organisations… making sure the electorate turns out to vote for him."
The mayor denies the allegations.
Panorama showed confidential paperwork that it says reveals the extent to which the mayor rejected recommendations from council officers on which charities to fund.
Council officers in Tower Hamlets proposed that Bengali and Somali groups receive £1.5m. But a review by Panorama of 362 grants approved by the mayor found that he increased funding to these organisations by nearly two-and-a-half times - to £3.6m.
To pay for it he used funds from the council's reserves and reduced what was left for other organisations by 25 per cent overall, it says.
But on a statement on his website, mayor Lutfur Rahman accused the BBC journalist John Ware who presented the Panorama programme, of “fiddling figures”.
It said: “The mayor refutes accusations that the council’s grants process was not sufficiently robust.
“The council does not profile organisations by race or ethnicity because charities benefit the whole community. Even using Ware’s definition of 'Bengali and Somali' organisations, figures held by the council show that these communities, which together make up 33 per cent of the borough’s population, received £1.6m in grants or around 16 per cent of the total pot of £9.7m."
Mayor Rahman added: “There is nothing untoward in the way we give out grants. Over 430 recommendations were made and I only made 32 changes; benefitting groups as diverse as Vietnamese refugees and the Royal Society for the Blind.”
He says that the Mainstream Grants Programme 2013-2015 went to four cabinet meetings, three corporate third sector grants programme boards and two overview and scrutiny meetings before the final executive decision by the mayor. It was only during the last stage of the process that the mayor made any direct alterations.
Mayor Rahman said: “Without any actual evidence to back up his claims, Ware has been reduced to fiddling statistics and relying on unsupported assertions from opposition Councillors to justify the amount of licence fee-payers' money spent on this programme. I’m proud to have delivered for all the residents of Tower Hamlets and I’ll be running on my record in May’s elections, not on smears.”
A BBC Panorama spokeswoman said it fully stands by its investigation.
Tower Hamlets council has a further statement from Mayor Rahman on its website, where he denies the BBC's claims and says governance in Tower Hamlets is strong.
