DOWNFALL OF THE TOWN HALL DESPOT
First Muslim mayor sacked as judge says ‘industrial scale fraud’ was ‘disgrace to democracy’
BRITAIN’S first elected Muslim mayor was kicked out of office yesterday after four ordinary voters defied threats, the risk of financial ruin and police apathy to expose him as an election cheat.
Lutfur Rahman ‘played the race card on every occasion’ in a bid to silence the four as Islamophobes. But they were vindicated by a judge who hailed their ‘exemplary courage’ and found Rahman guilty of systematic ballot rigging.
Rahman, a Bangladeshi-born former Labour council leader and the independent mayor of East London’s Tower Hamlets since 2010, was stripped of his job and banned from standing for public office or even voting for five years.
The legal challenge was launched by the four ordinary citizens at their own expense after the Electoral Commission and Scotland Yard were accused of turning a blind eye to ‘industrial scale’ voting fraud in Tower Hamlets that would shame Africa.
Yesterday electoral judge Richard Mawrey QC likened police officers who claimed there was ‘hushed calm’ at fraud-riven polling stations to the legendary ‘three wise monkeys’, who saw, heard and spoke no evil.
And in an apparent reference to the sexual exploitation scandals in Rotherham, Rochdale and Oxford, he said: ‘Events of recent months in contexts very different from electoral malpractice have starkly demonstrated what happens when those in authority are afraid to confront wrongdoing for fear of allegations of racism and Islamophobia. The law must be applied fairly and equally to everyone. Otherwise we are lost.’
The judge found that Rahman and his cronies stole the May 2014 election for mayor in Tower Hamlets by: Creating an army of ‘ghost voters’ Forging postal votes Bribing Muslim voters with money diverted from groups such as the Alzheimer’s Society
Wrongly branding Labour rival John Biggs a ‘racist’
Threatening Muslims they would go to hell unless they backed him
Rahman is the first person since the 19th century to be found guilty of the Victorian- era misdeed of unlawfully using religious influence.
Last night, the Metropolitan Police belatedly said it would now consider ‘whether’ to launch a criminal inquiry into his conduct.
In his ruling yesterday, Judge Mawrey branded Rahman a
‘They faced potentially devastating costs’ ‘Incapable of a straight answer’
pathological liar who had ‘driven a coach and horses’ through the law.
And he heaped praise on the four citizens who brought down the corrupt mayor, saying their ‘difficult, exhausting and anxious 11 months’ pursuing the case had been made all the worse knowing Rahman would falsely portray them as racists and Islamophobes.
The petitioners and their witnesses also endured many threats to get them to abandon the case.
Judge Mawrey, who in 2005 denounced ‘banana republic’ elections in Birmingham, said: ‘To bring an election petition as a private citizen requires enormous courage. If things go wrong, petitioners face a potentially devastating bill of costs.’
The four petitioners, led by retired businessman Andy Erlam, 64, said they had even been charged £6,000 by the Met for access to vital documents in the case.
He has previously worked as an elections monitor in Africa, yet said he had been astonished at the scale of vote-fixing in his home borough.
Yesterday after victory at the High Court, he said: ‘There was industrial-scale fraud going on and it was a disgrace to democracy. The town hall was being run by gangsters and now they have been thrown out.’
Last night Rahman – who was not in court – was still calling himself ‘the Mayor’, insisting in a statement on his website the judgment had come as ‘ a shock’. He denies extremism links and the judge said he had not seen evidence of any.
But the court’s verdict could scarcely have been harsher and he now faces financial ruin with a £1.3million legal bill after being ordered to pay everyone else’s costs. He was ordered to pay £250,000 within 14 days, and the judge told the lawyers they would have to ‘fight it out among themselves’ at an insolvency hearing if Rahman, 49, went bankrupt.
The judge said Rahman, who spent four days in the witness box, had ‘proved himself almost pathologically incapable of giving a straight answer’ and had ‘played the race card and the religious card … on every occasion’.
The mayor had ‘quite obviously’ rounded up people to testify in his favour and handed them readywritten witness statements – even when they barely spoke English.
He described how the ‘polished English prose’ in their statements had turned into ‘ rudimentary’ English when they spoke in the witness box.
He added: ‘The nadir came when one witness gave a graphic account of how he had attended a polling station to cast his vote and found it a haven of tranquillity, only to be confronted with absolutely incontrovertible evidence that they had, in fact, voted by post well before polling day.’
Judge Mawrey said: ‘ The Bangladeshi community might have thought itself fortunate to have been the recipient of the Mayor’s lavish spending but in the end the benefits were small and temporary and the ill effects longlasting. It was fool’s gold.’
Conservative councillor Peter Golds, who helped bring the case, said: ‘ This is a triumph for the people of Tower Hamlets and for democracy.’
London Mayor Boris Johnson added: ‘ I’m very glad that justice has taken its course and that a cloud has been lifted from Tower Hamlets.’
The scandal is an embarrassment to Labour grandees such as Ken Livingstone and former Labour MP George Galloway who backed him.