A Public Scandal

[fred c]

The Judge at the previous Tribunal offered the following comments at the end of his summing up.

Judge Buchanan said: "It is outrageous that such an organisation is not fulfilling its legal obligations".

"I'm only aware of this one case. I hope it's an isolated incident, but one is one too many."

If the latest court cases are heard by Judge Buchanan i can well imagine him being more than a little miffed with the MRA organisation & rightly so.

As an aside, i wonder if any members of the "Manor Clan" are likely to be taking the Association to court

[for fawkes sake]

The scandal of all of this is that, bad as this audit is, all of these things appear to have existed at the time that the £680,000 contract was awarded to the new Wilcox/Cranney company Who Cares and it looks very much as if councillors and council officers were well aware of this at the time.
This audit is also very limited in its scope concentrating exclusively on financial procedures but there are many other areas which are not covered.
We now know that at least a second tribunal is underway. How many more will there be and what efforts are being made to comply with the previous tribunal findings and compensate employees either past or present? Even here, I sense that all effort is being made to avoid make such compensatory payments. It was bad enough to be caught out paying less than the minimum wage; how bad is it to then try and avoid paying compensation as instructed?

[fred c]

Most posters are of the same opinion, it is about time this whole sorry mess of councillors being involved with voluntary / charitable grant funded organisations, is put under the forensic microscope of an Independent Firm of Accountants, & if neccessary the Police.

[intheloop]

after having dealings with ms wilcox in the past (1999/2000)  i know quite abit about the way she conducts herself and business and my opinion of her is lets say in the gutter where she belongs, so i am not at all suprised that this scandal has come about,  Manor Residents Community Group is a ltd company and manor residents is a charitable company and Who Cares (NE) is a cic company, ow can somebody with her  past run these type of companies. she was  also involved with a charity called CVT (community vocational training) and things didnt go right there either

[intheloop]

what people are forgetting is that she also has a conviction for animal cruelty, but as usual it wasnt her fault she blamed her daughter and baby sitter, what a laugh, the poor dog had tin in its stomach and was so thin you could not tell what breed it was, so allowing this women to have control of so much power is irresponsible.  also tell me this a company has 6 pcs and then they move to another building and only 3 pcs are moved to the new building but there was no explanation as to what happened to the misplaced pcs.

[mk1]

what people are forgetting is that she also has a conviction for animal cruelty,

Do you have a (rough) date in order to check up on the details? Was she called  Wilcox at the time?

If a press report could be found then it would help  expose this woman.

[marky]

what people are forgetting is that she also has a conviction for animal cruelty,

Do you have a (rough) date in order to check up on the details? Was she called  Wilcox at the time?

If a press report could be found then it would help  expose this woman.

It would be interesting to know the details but let's face it - this woman is already more exposed than Rockall.

[intheloop]

i cant rememer the exact date but it would be between 2000 and 2005 and her daughter was 13 at the time and they lived on wynyard road, it made front page headlines of the mail

[steveL]

now if you'd said that they were giving away a free dog's breakfast.....

[steveL]

This is known as being 'behind the wave'.

[The Great Dictator]

Hard to believe that most of the council and officers sanctioned this outfit and give them £650,000 

[testing times]

Surely we are well passed the time when any 'changes' are credible. The council should have made sure the organisation was being properly run before giving them such a massive contract or they should have dismissed the whole idea and given the contract to someone else.

From what I'm reading, even the council had concerns and put down a load of conditions attached to the contract - none of which seem to have been acted on. Isn't that straight forward negligence on the part of the Council?   

[steveL]

Just a thought but does anyone actually believe that CAB hadn't seen the report by the time The Mail asked him for a comment?

[fred c]

No they didn't TGD.... the two organisations are "Totally separate".... Councillor Hall said so, so they must be. 

Ohhhhhhhhhh yes i remember it well, he also said there were no conflict of Interest..... ROFLMAO at that one.

There should be "No" Lessons learned as far as this organisation is concerned & also the discredited WC(N/E) they should be cut looose from any connection to HBC immediately, no ifs, no buts.

There are 3 sitting councillors connected to Manor Residents, the Manager  CllrA Wilcox & 2 trustees,  Cllr S Akers Belcher &  Cllr P Beck, they are all accountable for allowing this scandal to have developed in the first place, & even more damming is the fact that it has been allowed to continue for a number of years.

A 4th councillor has connections with Manor Residents, Cll Ged Hall actually signed off a set of accounts for this organisation.

There have been grounds for suspicion for a number of years about the financial probiety of MR, yet it has taken the efforts by the HTH team & members of HTH to generate any real action on what has been going on.

Lets see Cab & his Consort talk themselves out of this.

There is a lot more to come I`m sure.... But for now..... Well done HTH

[SRMoore]

For once I have to agree with Christopher