Essential discipline

… But in a statement defending the spending Alexandra Palace Trading Company said:

"In the context of attempting to secure this massive investment to restore the Palace, we think people will understand that associated costs on advisers, legal fees and other expertise is money well spent.

The figures from this pressure group conflate spending with several different firms of advisers in several different essential disciplines over several years. It would be bizarre to suggest that the senior management and Trustees would have gone into a £45million negotiation with a property developer without legal advice, or that the trust does not merit the best advisers in essential areas.

Such claims just show how those focused on a single issue don't 'get' what it is going to take to really save Alexandra Palace".

Statement made to Ham and High newspaper
10 April 2008

Comment:

THE STATEMENT from the Alexandra Palace Trading Company, defending the blazing spending again comes from a unnamed spokesperson. The statement uses PR phraseology and almost certainly comes from APTL’s expensive public affairs company, Lexington Communications. This PR company specializes in crisis management and are themselves a big part of the burning of our cash (£182 k worth of smoke and rising).

Yet again, the AP Trustees hide behind anonymous spin doctors instead of taking personal responsibility for their decisions.

APTL-Lexington’s argument, in essence, is that the big spending is a sprat to catch a mackerel; that the millions already gone are justified because they will gain much more from the sale. If this was truly the context, the spending might make sense.

First, the sale price is reported to be a derisory £1.5 million – a sum never denied by APTL and a sum now well exceeded by the sale costs. Secondly, the “massive investment” intimated by Firoka has been variously reported as £75m, £55m and now £45 million (what is it?).

APTL knows how much of these fantastic sums, allegedly to restore the palace, that they have received so far: not one penny. All these figures are illusory and none of them will materialize.

Last year Firoka served notice that they reserved the right to withdraw without notice; not even a single penny of the agreed sale price was received. In their hearts, the members of the AP Board know the truth about the extent of good faith demonstrated so far by their ‘preferred development partner’.

What Lexington language cannot re-cast is the reputation, in Oxfordshire over many years, of the Developer-of-Last-Resort. The Kassam Stadium, the Oxford United Football club and the deal with Oxford City Council are all public information. If ordinary members of the public can Google about this, why didn’t our local Council exercise due diligence on the reliability and trustworthiness of their ‘preferred partner’?

Lexington would have us believe the Trust Board has behaved responsibly. Nothing could be further from the truth! We think people will understand this by reading the High Court Judgment and the latest set of Alexandra Palace accounts.

The PR company adapts the truth when they say “the figures [have come] from this pressure group". As Lexington well know, the figures were required to be supplied by law from Haringey Council. They were provided unlawfully late and only after formal request under the Freedom of Information Act 2000.

Lexington insinuate that SAP have exaggerated the wasteful spending. They try to minimize the size of the bonfire by saying that the figures conflate spending over “several” years – as stated, these figures are for the 24 months to November 2007. They may under-represent spending on the fire-sale, because there will have been sale-related spending before and after this period. The extent of spending on APTL’s law firm Bates Wells and Braithwaite is unknown and not included, because although asked for under the FoI Act, it was declined with flimsy excuse.

Lexington described the spending as being on “essential disciplines”. Interesting choice of words – would that be like the discipline the Council exercised over the Palace rebuilding costs in the 1980s or are we expected to believe that spending is now under strict discipline? The only discipline that is essential, is a flogging of the AP Board for wasting so much of our money!

Most of us would be wise to seek good legal advice if buying or selling property. It might be thought unsurprising that a PR firm raises in this context the subject of the need for legal advice.

It beggars belief that a PR company, even one specializing in crisis management, would have the brass neck to imply that in this case, the £800k plus spent on law firms, has been money well spent on the best advice and expertise.

Thanks to the Judicial Review, some of the veil of obsessive secrecy over the agreed Lease was lifted. We now know that this was a disastrous deal for the public who are the beneficiaries of the Trust. For all the protection we have, the Lease might as well have been written by the property developer’s lawyers (as it was) – and then simply signed by the Council without legal representation. That would have saved a lot of money. The £800,000 of lawyers’ fees bought us … nothing.

It would be interesting to know what Lexington has charged us – via the our charity – for their 120-word sound-bite of distortion, but we probably won’t see a breakdown to that detail. At our cost, Lexington send an spin-doctor to each Alexandra Palace Board meeting. Lexington will soon have a real crisis management job to perform on behalf of their client and it will be interesting to see how fast they can really spin!

Finally, the PR company misrepresents the role of the Save Ally Group campaign group whom they describe, not for the first time, using typical Lexington-language as a ‘single issue’ group. The mouthpieces of slave-owners probably described William Wilberforce’s anti-slavery campaign as ‘single-issue’. There’s nothing inherently wrong with a single issue, especially if it’s a good one. The main focus of SAP is to oppose the Council’s shameful deal.

However, SAP’s aims also include the preservation of the world’s first television studios (so casually abandoned by Haringey) and safeguarding the ‘Father’ Willis Organ and the Victorian theatre. And not least, to change the trustees away from the transitory local Councillors who have proved so inept over so long. SAP has already presented a positive alternative, The Way Forward.

The present managers are living in a detached bureaucratic-world where they seem to believe the amount of paper that they and their lawyers generate is equal to the likelihood of the Firoka fire-sale going through. It is those currently in charge of AP who do not “get it”, that giving away our charity asset to The Property Developer-of-Last-Resort, does not count as saving it!

Haringey Council’s free magazine: I apologise and take back all my criticism (!?)

Haringey People magazine and its coverage of the High Court of Justice decision that led to costs awarded against the Council.

I take back my criticism of Haringey People as a journal of Council propaganda. Some people thought that Haringey tries to suppress news that does not reflect well on them. So you can imagine my surprise at the extent of coverage of one particular story in the latest Haringey People issue (p.16, December 2007), which confounds Council critics.

Everyone can now read the full story about the Council defeat in the High Court of Justice over Alexandra Palace on 5 October 2007. Devoting a double-page spread (‘Highlights of 2007’) to the Council’s reversal was more than fair: it is a credit to the dedicated investigative journalists on the People staff.

The article also went into detail about the punishment meted out: both how and why the Council came to have costs awarded against them, by a judge who was highly critical of their conduct. It all proves that the editors of Haringey People are making a strong effort to be open, objective and impartial.

“AUTHORS OF THEIR OWN MISFORTUNE” was the banner headline, quoting the judge’s words about the Trustees (i.e. the Council). This is proof positive that Haringey People gives space to viewpoints that differ from those of the majority group.

Haringey People – paid for out of general taxation – can now show it is not simply a mouthpiece for the majority group and the centre-fold spread is the proof. This big article gives the lie to any suggestion that the publication is just a means for the ruling party to communicate with its supporters and is little more than a misuse of public funds.

(Was this change of heart possibly helped by public relations firm Lexington Communications, in a move to make a clean breast of what had gone on before?) Although there was copious coverage in Haringey People, if anyone is interested in reading just a little more information, please visit this web-site for the Court Decision.

In the same spirit of openness, I wonder if the next issue of Haringey People will carry out a thorough investigation into the accounts at Alexandra Palace and of the ‘sale’ itself?

Can I suggest an in-depth, follow-up interview with Firoka boss Shaun Ormrod at the Palace? Shaun leads the Firoka team who were let into the Palace by the Trustees (and without payment), just four weeks after the Charity Commission sealed the Order allowing the sale. The same Order later quashed in the High Court. The public might be interested to know why Mr. Ormrod may now be given notice to vacate and why?

I’m sure Shaun would be delighted to have an opportunity to speak frankly and on the record. Has the Charitable Trust received any money for the sale of the building or any money from the events at Alexandra Palace that have taken place in the last six months? That might total millions of pounds that might be better in Council coffers.

....

ON A RELATED point, I was delighted to see that the Chairman of the Board of Trustees of Alexandra Palace has promised that the public will never again be excluded from Board meetings. He has even apologized for the exclusion of the press and public from previous Charitable Trust Board meetings, “after all, they are the beneficiaries of the Trust, our decisions affect them and they need to feel a part of the Board’s decisions. We now believe in inclusiveness and community involvement. There has been too much secrecy in the past”.

The newly appointed young chairman is showing a welcome independent line, demonstrating that he is keen to make a clean break with the past and set a new open agenda. This change of heart is overdue – the public have always been beneficiaries of the Charitable Trust.

Next the public might even be given copies of the secret documents about the sale of Alexandra Palace to a favoured business partner for a reported £1.5 million.

Haringey People is worth every penny of its cover price.

• LBH unable to distinguish truth from falsehood

THERE is an old Turkish proverb which holds that, no matter how far you’ve gone down a road having taken the wrong turning, go back. Haringey Council has yet to demonstrate they understand this.

A total of 328 people wrote to the Charity Commission during their ‘Consultation’ over granting of a 125-year Lease of Alexandra Palace last December. I was one of the smaller number of 324 who wrote expressing concern and who were ignored.

Haringey Council is determined to turn a blind eye to the destruction of the world’s first TV studios and site of the first TV broadcasting - and was seeking to cover it up. They gambled that no one would be brave enough to take them on and they lost.

The High Court of Justice recently ruled that the Consultation (about Haringey’s shady deal) was unfair and fatally-flawed. The Palace’s Trustees had tried to bulldoze it through. After the damning double defeat by the Judicial Review, many questions are now raised about our Council that manipulates the AP Trust Board.

The Judge was so cross with the Trustees and their behaviour that he awarded costs against them (he said that the Trustees were “the authors of their own misfortune”). Unless the Board Chairman is found personally liable, this cash will come out of the hide of us ratepayers along with all the other money Haringey have wasted along the way.

Will anyone take responsibility for this debacle? Was there no one on the Board who saw this coming? The Chairman of the Alexandra Palace Trust Board will need to consider his position. The quality of advice received by the AP Trust Board from the Board’s Solicitor has to be called into question. The Trustees were prepared to - and did – bully the Charity Commission and drag the Commission’s name into the mud. The quality of advice and the behaviour of Haringey’s in-house legal advisors might also be questioned.

Does Councillor Cooke feel so wronged by the High Court decision that he will Appeal it? The puppet Trust may even have left themselves open to legal action from their preferred developer, Firoka, on the grounds that Firoka was mislead by the AP Trust over the requirement to make the Lease public.

The current Board Chairman, Councillor M. Cooke, was not responsible for the original misconceived policies of the Board. The previous boss Charles Adje vacated the hot-seat in the nick of time, earlier this year. But when Cllr. Cooke accepted the poison-chalice promotion, he continued the same misguided policies with real zeal.

Cooke set about a personal attack of questionable truthfulness on a private citizen (Jacob O’Callaghan) who had the temerity to ask inconvenient questions about AP. (What drives an elected politician to behave like this towards an honest historian?). But that resident was not cowed and was still confident enough to initiate a Judicial Review. And he now has the satisfaction of having a High Court Judge rule in his favour and see issued a stinging judgment against the Charity Commission. But can we now trust the very ‘Interested Party’, Cooke’s Trust?

Cllr. Cooke’s bulldozer, fuelled with high-octane hubris, has hit the steel wall of the law. Cooke had earlier accused O’Callaghan of being incorrect, misleading and wrong and had asserted that a copy of the AP Lease was on the resident’s website. Mr O’Callaghan is owed an apology, together with the hundreds of other people who wrote in to the Charity Commission expressing concern about Haringey’s shady deal.

In a debate on The Future of Alexandra Palace in a full Council meeting of 16 July 2007, that I attended, Cllr. Cooke blustered:

"All of this has been discussed, is in the public domain."

Reality check:

Since December 2006, and under the Freedom of Information Act (2000), I have sought documents from Haringey about the disposal of The People’s Palace, but without success.

Despite repeated requests, Haringey Council’s Corporate Legal Services (HCLS) refuse to confirm that the Chairman’s statement is true. They studiously ignore the fact that they are well-placed to give an authoritative answer:

The arm of the Council dealing with these requests (i.e. stonewalling) is none other than HCLS. And they knew better than anyone that the future of the Palace is not in the public domain: because they are the very outfit whose job it is to make certain that the sale documents remained concealed from the public!

The secrecy that surrounds the sale of AP is obsessive. Even the building survey, which we paid for, is marked Confidential.

Haringey’s lawyers really owe more loyalty to their political bosses - regardless of the truth - than to the public. If HCLS are unwilling to give an opinion it will need to go to the UK Standards Board unless some contrition is shown. The public deserves more integrity.

At the first forum in which Haringey was obliged to fight about AP on a level playing-field which they were unable to manipulate - the High Court - they were comprehensively defeated. Will they learn from this or attempt to drive on as before? Unfortunately, this dénouement is only the latest chapter in a story of deceit and incompetence by Haringey over AP that goes back years.

To Cllr. Cooke I say: park the bulldozer, switch off the engine and climb down. Stop attempting to flog the People’s Palace for peanuts, or at all. Talk to the many people who have more vision and knowledge about AP than the current Trustees and whose attention is focused on more than just getting rid of AP at any price.

If you cannot do these things for the citizens of this Borough, indeed for this city and nation, hand over to a more competent, experienced operator who can.

[letter to local newspapers
15 October 2007]