Harringay, Haringey - So Good they Spelt it Twice!
Cllr Charles Adje Suspended by Standards Board and Labour Group
Yesterday, (31.3.11) Haringey Standards board hearing found Cllr Charles Adje, former chair of the Ally Pally board of trustees, has breached the councillors' standards code while Haringey attempted to flog off Ally Pally to ex-slum landlord Firoz Kassam.
Cllr Adje was Accused and Found to have concealed an important briefing note from his fellow-trustees. The briefing note written by Keith Holder former APP General Manager, stated that there was no need to further sweeten the deal with more financial inducements to Kassam's company – Firoka, to ensure the deal (May 2007). Holder who appeared at the first day of the hearing admitted to later collude in the suppression of this information out of loyalty to the political group he served for 15 years in Haringey, and to Adje himself.
Adje who represented himself in this hearing, crossed examined Holder at length, which was later described as both personal attack on him and his competence as an officer. Cllr Adje was pressed by the council's solicitors to explain why he had not disclosed the note to his fellow trustees, a move which resulted in over 2 million pounds loss of income from the Palace exhibition business, which went straight into Firoka's coffers.
Adje resigned as chair in early 2007, when it was clear that the deal to flog off the Palace, was going to be legally challenged. However, by that time the trustees had already allowed Firoka to occupy the palace without paying any rent, or wages to the palace employees, causing huge losses. They could not contemplate that their plans could unravel and only a month after the high court ruling in Oct 2007, they started considering evicting Firoka - which took few more months to accomplish.
In his defence Cllr Adje submitted “the persistent pursuit of this matter, which should have been laid to rest after the first Walklate report has the every appearance of a witch hunt”, This is an interesting but not surprising comment, given that the ‘crucial briefing note’ which formed the basis for this complaint and hearing ONLY came to light in THE SECOND Walklate report. If we did not have the second Walklate report, we wouldn’t have never uncovered the truth, or the contradicting accounts regarding the relationship and contact with Kassam given to the 2 separate Walklate investigations.
Adje’s defence continued: “I have never in my experience and when I was leader of the council when I transformed it to a –Good 3 Star performing Authority with Good Prospects for Improvement, known it to be in ‘breach’ not to share such information... It is ludicrous to infer or allege that I would compromise the impartiality of an experienced officer...”
It must have come as a great shock then, when the panel imposed a further rehabilitating sanction in the form of ‘retraining period’ under the supervision of the monitoring officer within the first 6 months upon his return to Council duties...
By persisting with this complaint, Clive Carter had forced the two key players to justify their actions, in the full glare of the public gaze, resulting in former council leader Charles Adje being suspended for four months after the five-member panel agreed he had brought the council into disrepute.
When asked by the determination panel chair: what he would consider to be an appropriate sanction? Adje said: No further sanctions should be imposed, as being found guilty is punishment enough. A view obviously not shared by his colleagues, who further suspended him from the labour group in addition to the 4 month suspension from council duties and allowances.
Council leader Claire Kober is quoted in the independent as saying: “Charles Adje has been suspended from the Haringey Labour Group. He can no longer participate in our decision-making or policy development, nor will he be eligible to attend any Haringey Labour Group meetings.”
It is unclear if such discharge from ‘work’ will be considered punishment by Adje, who during this hearing publicaly stated a number of times - he went to serve as the chair of the APP board seeking an “EASY LIFE”...
Kober also said: “I am very disappointed by Charles and his actions. His conduct fell well below the standards expected of any Councillor but he has particularly failed to meet the high expectations that the Labour Party places on its members who hold elected office.”
Although such a move is welcomed and goes some way in giving the right message in an attempt to restore public confidence, it can arguably be seen to be - too little too late, especially since questionable conduct including the complaint that lead to this hearing, was flagged out few times, even before the last election.
In guidance on appropriate sanctions, council lawyer Terence Mitchison advised the panel to consider that Adje was found to be in breach of conduct once before by the standards Board for England (case no. SBE21513.08) and he proceeded to read the case summary out loud. At the centre of case no. SBE21513.08 was yet another property set to be flogged to another developer – This was the story of the Welbourne centre.
At the time, just before the last election, there was little appetite for honest self reflection within Adje’s political group, but the attempt to cover it up failed and the story was exposed for all to read.
I would like to hope this is indeed a new chapter in Haringey council transparency and accountability, but I don’t hold my breath. Do you?
Tags for Forum Posts: Adje, Alexandra, Ally, Charles, Cllr, Council, Firoka, Haringey, Palace, Report, More…
Replies to This Discussion
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Permalink Reply by Alan Stanton on
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Unfortunately, the search facility you've linked to on the Standards for England website doesn't show cases more than two years old. This link still works. But it's a brief summary. Standards for England refused to supply the full report.
To its enormous credit, our own local Standards Committee publishes documents in full.
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Permalink Reply by GN8 on
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Thank you Alan for providing a link that works
I also found that both the Hornsey Journal and the Ham and High now have news items on their on-line editions about it.
The opening statement in the Journal is: "Charles Adje has also been booted out of Haringey’s Labour Group - suspended indefinitely by council leader Councillor Claire Kober." Is that true? was he indeed suspended indefinitely? And if so what does it mean in real terms?
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Permalink Reply by Clive Carter on
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As you know Ofer, I was the Complainant in this case. I bear Cllr. Adje no personal grudge, not least because I've never had anything to do with him. But regardless of how long is his party suspension, I sincerely hope he takes the hint and withdraws from public life.
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All Labour Groups of councillors are bound by the Party's national rules. The Rulebook is quite clear on this:
"The group whip should be suspended with immediate effect on the findings of a standards body against a member, and an investigation be established to decide on the appropriate internal sanction."
Cllr Matt Cooke, the Labour Chief Whip, wrote to all Haringey Labour councillors telling us of "the removal of the Labour whip from Charles for an indefinite period".
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And the Council should have followed-up Liz's suggestion while it still had the chance.
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In your experience what is considered an appropriate internal sanction in such cases?
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Ofer, as things now stand, whatever I or anyone else may think, Cllr Adje has rights under both the Standards Committee process and the Labour Party's rules. Which includes rights of appeal.
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Yes, you are right, however with the absence of new and conclusive evidence there may be very little point but more humiliation, and since this hearing took over a year to manifest, I should think all parties had sufficient time to unearth such evidence, if it indeed existed...
But, if one choose to appeal anyway, who hears it? The same board? or does it go somewhere else?
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As you were at the Standards Committee hearing, you may have a copy of the Documents Pack. It included the procedure in great detail, including rights to appeal. Anyone else interested can download the pack from the Council's website here. (Though as previously noted it's currently a 38 megabyte document.)
Beyond that I'm simply not going to speculate.
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Unless and until the Council supplies a properly formatted pdf file (which ought to be text-searchable and a fraction of the size of 38 megabytes), there is a rough workaround.
On this page, the council lists 37 Supporting Documents, all pdfs in varying size from 22 KB to 2 MB.
Walklate 3 The investigator's Final Report (35 pages) is a separate file, No.12. Link:
12 - App 1 Investigation report, item 8.
PDF 821 KBLink to a Council scan of my original Complaint:
13 - App 2 Complaint, item 8.
PDF 897 KBBelow, I've attached the original file sent to the Council: note that it is under 10% of the file-size of the Council's scanned paper version (above).
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Complaint re CA.pdf, 86 KB
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Thanks for the links, Clive. It's especially helpful, as I was told this morning that Haringey will probably will not be able to publish the "Documents Pack" as text-PDFs. This is because they were mainly supplied in the format they're now in.
The problem of huge bloated non-searchable files on Haringey website has gone on for several years. I raised it in 2007 with the (then) Chief Executive, Dr Ita O'Donovan. Who assured me she would "remind" her senior colleagues, and hoped this would "alleviate any future problems".
I replied suggesting Dr O'Donovan might "insist" instead of "remind". And that the problem needed to be "solved", not "alleviated". I pointed out that any organisation can achieve sub-standard goals by setting them low enough. -
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