Mayor of Tower Hamlets Dismissed

[Sheilbh]

Met considers criminal inquiry into Tower Hamlets mayor Lutfur Rahman
Rahman is told to vacate post immediately after election court judge finds him guilty of widespread corruption in seeking office last May
Rajeev Syal and Ben Quinn
Thursday 23 April 2015 20.53 BST

Police are considering whether to launch a criminal inquiry relating to the former mayor of Tower Hamlets after he was found guilty of multiple corruption allegations by the high court on Thursday and kicked out of office.

The mayoral election in the east London borough will be rerun after Lutfur Rahman and his supporters were found to have used religious intimidation through local imams, vote-rigging and wrongly branding his Labour rival a racist to gain power.

Rahman, who has been banned from seeking office again, was also found to have allocated local grants to buy votes. He was ordered to pay immediate costs of £250,000 from a bill expected to reach £1m.

Summing up, Judge Richard Mawrey said Rahman had sought to play the "race and Islamophobia card" throughout the election and would no doubt do so after this judgment. "He was an evasive witness – Rahman was no doubt behind illegal and corrupt practices," Mawrey said.

He also faces being stripped of his profession as a lawyer after the judge claimed he told "a pack of lies" in the witness box.

The ferocity of the judge's verdict provoked gasps in court. Friends of Rahman claimed he had been unfairly treated.

Police on Thursday struggled to react to the judgment, based mainly on evidence put together by local voters. Last April, detectives examined allegations of electoral fraud and corruption against Rahman but found no evidence of criminal wrongdoing.

A Met statement last night said the force has noted the judgment and will consider the 200-page report.

Rahman, who is no longer mayor and will be removed from the electoral roll, expressed shock at the judgment and said he was considering launching a judicial review – his only possible cause of legal action.

A statement on his website said: "Today's judgment has come as a shock – the mayor strongly denies any wrongdoing and had full confidence in the justice system, and so this result has been surprising to say the least."

Even if he does challenge the ruling, he will not stop a new mayoral election, which is expected to be held in mid-June. Rahman is barred from standing again.

Outside the Royal Courts of Justice in central London, Biggs said the ruling was "a victory for honest politics".

However, Ken Livingstone, the former London mayor, said he was "distinctly uncomfortable" with a court's ability to remove an elected mayor. "If there is any illegality, then surely that's a matter for the police.

"I'm uneasy that a mayor who has taken on the political powers in a borough can be removed by someone who is essentially a bureaucrat. What I don't understand is why he [Mawrey] found evidence of corruption that the police have so far failed to identify," he told the Guardian.

The judge handed down his verdict on Thursday after a 10-week hearing at the Royal Courts of Justice.

A group of four residents – defined as petitioners by the election court – had called for last year's mayoral election, in which Rahman triumphed over Labour rival John Biggs, to be declared void.

Mawrey said: "The evidence laid before this court, limited though it necessarily was to the issues raised in the petition, has disclosed an alarming state of affairs in Tower Hamlets.

"This is not the consequence of the racial and religious mix of the population, nor is it linked to any ascertainable pattern of social or other deprivation. It is the result of the ruthless ambition of one man. The real losers in this case are the citizens of Tower Hamlets."

Mawrey said the effect of his ruling was that "Mr Rahman's election as mayor on 22 May 2014 was void – that is to say, it is as if it had never taken place."

Rahman's election agent, Alibor Choudhary, was also banned as a councillor with immediate effect.

The petitioners were praised by the judge for their courage and told that they had been fully vindicated.

They called for a criminal inquiry into Rahman but questioned whether it could be carried out by local police because of their "connections" to Rahman.

Azmal Hussain, a petitioner who said he would have lost his Brick Lane businesses if they had lost the case, dismissed concerns that the judgment would be seen as racist.

"The people who have really suffered are ordinary people of all races who were supposed to accept corruption because it comes from someone claiming to be against racism. It is corruption, pure and simple, and it should be challenged," he said.

During the hearing, the court heard evidence from a handwriting expert that hundreds of ballot papers carried marks suggesting they could have been filled out by the same person.

Rahman was also accused of making false statements about the personal character of Biggs by branding him a racist. "No rational person could think Mr Biggs was a racist – it was a deliberate and dishonest campaign. Rahman and Choudhary are personally guilty," said the judge.

The judgment also found Rahman to be the first person since the 19th century to be found guilty of the misdeed of unlawful religious influence.

As the then mayor campaigned for re-election, local Muslims were told "that it was a religious duty to vote for Mr Rahman", the judge said.

It was claimed that a Bengali newspaper, the Weekly Desh, published a letter signed by 101 Islamic leaders, which was "intended to have undue influence on the Muslim population of the borough".

Mawrey also said "bribery" had been "proved" following an examination of grants in the borough. He said the "administration of grants" had been "firmly in the personal hands of Mr Rahman" and "cronies".

"In administering the grants policy, Mr Rahman acted in total disregard of the council's officers, its members and, almost certainly, the law," he said.

Allegations of intimidation at polling stations fell "just short" of being proved beyond reasonable doubt and so Mawrey rejected them "with considerable misgiving".

Yet he found that the behaviour of Rahman's supporters had been "deplorable, even indefensible".

Police had failed to spot obvious intimidation on election day, the judge said. He suggested that "an unkind person might remark that the policemen ... had appeared to take as their role model the legendary Three Wise Monkeys".

In an unusual move, Mawrey said that he was sure that the Law Commission would take a close look at the judgment as it weighed up possible reforms to electoral law.

The judge will also report Rahman to the Solicitors Regulation Authority which could lead to further action that may result in his suspension as a solicitor.

The Director of Public Prosecutions will consider the evidence in the case, raising the prospect of a criminal investigation into the poll.

The verdict comes after the communities secretary, Eric Pickles, ordered a team of commissioners to ensure the council was properly run after a PwC report last year found it flouted spending rules.

The judgement in full:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/shared/bsp/hi/pdfs/judgment.pdf

I will read as I'm told it's well-written and pretty jaw-dropping. Everyone's sharing this example of how not to use witness evidence


Edit: 'Clearly, we have long since moved on from those halcyon, though corrupt, days.'
' It is very tempting (and Mr Penny did not shrink from the role of tempter) to regard undue spiritual influence as a historical anomaly, designed to counter the baleful influence of the Roman Catholic clergy of (largely the southern counties of) Ireland over elections in the late 19th century (). Can it be supposed, ran the rhetorical question, that undue spiritual influence can have any meaning in the secular society of 21st century Britain?
149 The court must, however, resist the siren voices.'
'Truly, in Tower Hamlets, if the EDL did not exist, like Voltaire's God, it would be necessary to invent it.'
' Although faced with searching, hostile and, it must be said, occasionally mildly offensive questioning, Mr Rahman was unfailingly courteous and polite. With regret, that is the only positive thing that can be said about his evidence.'
'It may be necessary to indicate when dealing with such a witness's evidence whether this tactic was employed, though it must be said in this context that when an interpreter was requested by the editor of a newspaper which publishes in English, one felt that one's credulity was being pushed to its outermost limits'

[Jaron]

To be or not to be.... 

[MadImmortalMan]

Ken's point about a court being able to unseat an elected official is a good one. That's a bad precedent.

[MadImmortalMan]

Remember James Traficant was still in office while in jail, and the Congress had to vote to remove him from office.

[Drakken]

Remember James Traficant was still in office while in jail, and the Congress had to vote to remove him from office.

One cookie to the one who guesses who was the only Congressman to vote Nay on his impeachment.

[Martinus]

The mayoral election in the east London borough will be rerun after Lutfur Rahman and his supporters were found to have used religious intimidation through local imams, vote-rigging and wrongly branding his Labour rival a racist to gain power.

Vote-rigging may be a crime, but I can't see how the other two can be. Sounds more like campaigning as usual.

[Martinus]

The judgment also found Rahman to be the first person since the 19th century to be found guilty of the misdeed of unlawful religious influence.

As the then mayor campaigned for re-election, local Muslims were told "that it was a religious duty to vote for Mr Rahman", the judge said.

It was claimed that a Bengali newspaper, the Weekly Desh, published a letter signed by 101 Islamic leaders, which was "intended to have undue influence on the Muslim population of the borough".

I'm not fond of religion and Islam in particular, but this is fucking insane.

[The Brain]

who has been banned from seeking office again

wut

[Sheilbh]

Ken's point about a court being able to unseat an elected official is a good one. That's a bad precedent.

In recent years it's normally been in council elections with dodgy postal vote scandals, often particularly in South Asian communities.

Though in 2010 a Labour MP in Oldham was dismissed having been found guilty of making false statements about his Lib Dem opponent - that he was in cahoots with Islamic fundamentalists. In many ways part of this case is the reverse a Bengali politician guilty of accusing his Labour opponent of being a racist who encouraged the EDL.

Anyway the judge discussed your point:

The criticism is usually voiced in terms of 'unelected judges unseating democratically elected politicians', the obvious implication being that this process is itself undemocratic.
19 There are two answers to this criticism. First the resolution of disputed elections by the courts is not a power the judges have arrogated to themselves. It is a task laid upon them by Parliament, a task, what is more, that the judiciary originally resisted tooth and nail. As the history of election courts set out in Woolas in the Divisional Court, when, in 1868, it was proposed that election disputes should be referred to the courts, the then Lord Chief Justice, Sir Alexander Cockburn Bt (ironically the country's leading expert in electoral law), wrote a stern letter of protest to the Lord Chancellor and earned himself an unflattering cartoon in Punch for his pains4 . All to no avail. The reason is obvious: if, as Parliament believed, and has continued to believe, politicians cannot be trusted to resolve election disputes fairly, then who is left but the judiciary? Election courts have thus lasted from 1868 to the present.
20 The second reason is that the criticism itself begs the question. If a candidate is elected in breach of the rules for elections laid down in the legislation, then he cannot be said to have been 'democratically elected'. In elections, as in sport, those who win by cheating have not properly won and are disqualified. Nor is it of any avail for the candidate to say 'I would have won anyway' because cheating leads to disqualification whether it was necessary for the victory or not. In recent election  cases, for example, it has been proved that candidates were elected by the use of hundreds (in Birmingham, thousands) of forged votes: would anyone seriously claim that those candidates had been 'democratically elected'?

Remember James Traficant was still in office while in jail, and the Congress had to vote to remove him from office.

Sure but there's a difference between being corrupt and being elected corruptly.

Vote-rigging may be a crime, but I can't see how the other two can be. Sounds more like campaigning as usual.

Both banned by statute. You (and your agents) can't make a statement about another candidate's personal character, during or before an election, that you either know to be false or are reckless as to the truth.

The 'spiritual injury' undue influence element is amazing. I had no idea it existed. Here's the statute:

(1)A person shall be guilty of a corrupt practice if he is guilty of undue influence.
(2) A person shall be guilty of undue influence--
(a) if he, directly or indirectly, by himself or by any other person on his behalf, makes use of or threatens to make use of any force, violence or restraint, or inflicts or threatens to inflict, by himself or by any other person, any temporal or spiritual injury, damage, harm or loss upon or against any person in order to induce or compel that person to vote or refrain from voting, or on account of that person having voted or refrained from voting;

I get what the defence barrister's saying that it's an outdated bit of statute and something of a historical anomaly. But, as the judge points out this section has been incorporated into consolidated and updated election acts twice in the post-war era. Those acts have also been much amended and it's still there. So Parliament's had the choice of getting rid of it many times and they haven't - apparently some other countries like France have similar laws.