Crook who ruthlessly played the race card

FOR five years Lutfur Rahman ran the borough of Tower Hamlets like a personal fiefdom – one that was lavishly funded by taxpayers. His smirking face was plastered all over council leaflets, lampposts and official signs. Even the bin lorries were branded with his name.

But, should anyone challenge the mayor’s right to rule like a ‘medieval monarch’, then he would play the race card.

Opponents were invariably attacked as racist or Islamophobic – none more so that those who ran against him for office and the brave petitioners who eventually brought him to justice.

Indeed, yesterday judge Richard Mawrey said in his damning ruling that Rahman had ‘played the race card and the religious card … on every occasion’.

In Rahman’s home province of Sylhet in Bangladesh, however, the locals could not be more proud of the man who left their country as a boy of four and became Britain’s first elected Muslim mayor.

‘We feel proud because he represents Bangladesh in London,’ said Hazi Abdul Mannan, 76, who knew the 49year-old Rahman as a youngster.

Those words are probably true – just not, perhaps, in the sense that Mr Abdul Mannan intended them for Bangladesh is one of the most corrupt nations on earth.

And corruption is what Sylhet’s most famous son is now likely to be remembered for in Tower Hamlets.

He rode through the borough – which has the highest levels of child poverty in the land – in a chauffeur-driven Mercedes costing £60,000 a year that was even used to pick up his dry cleaning.

MORE disturbingly, he had close links to an Islamic extremist group – the Islamic Forum of Europe (IFE) – and allegedly channelled millions of pounds of council money to its front organisations, while diverting council grants away from secular bodies. He denies any wrongdoing.

The young Rahman had arrived in Tower Hamlets in the late 1960s after his parents fled political upheaval in what was then East Pakistan, now today’s independent Bangladesh. His childhood was spent in the East End, attending Marner Primary School and Bow Secondary School – where classmates recall him as an ‘under-achiever’ – before he took a law degree at City University. After becoming a trainee solicitor, and just before his 27th birthday, he married Ayesha Farid, 21, a restaurant owner’s daughter from Shrewsbury in 1992.

She moved in with him and his father and brother at the red-brick terraced house in Old Montague Street where they still all live. A daughter Nabiha was born four years later and ten years later a son, Hamza, now nine.

Rahman worked at a local firm of solicitors, McCormacks, and in his spare time became a Labour councillor in 2002, rising to be leader in 2008.

In 2010, Tower Hamlets introduced the post of directly- elected mayor. Rahman assumed he would be the Labour candidate, but found himself cut out of the party’s shortlist.

He launched an extraordinary challenge at the High Court.

Honing tactics that would later help him become mayor, he went on to beat the other six candidates to win Labour’s mayoral nomination – by allegedly ‘fixing’ the vote. Even his two sisters, Karen and Kelly, voted despite neither being entitled to do so because they did not live in the borough. One of his defeated Labour rivals, Helal Abbas, was so furious however that he sent a damning dossier to Labour’s National Executive Committee, exposing Rahman’s links with the Islamic Forum of Europe, which campaigns for a sharia state. To his fury, Rahman was thrown out of the party.

He established himself as an independent, registering his own party named Tower Hamlets First and going on to win the mayoral contest in 2010 – and re-election in the most controversial of circumstances in 2014.

The election court heard how, during his time as mayor, Rahman had siphoned public funds to IFE front organisations and presided over £2million in council funding for the East London Mosque and the Osmani Trust, a Muslim- only youth group allied with the IFE. Indeed, the IFE mobilised hundreds of supporters to achieve Rahman’s election victories.

It has links to the Birmingham ‘Trojan Horse’ plot and, according to own leaflets, wants to change the ‘very infrastructure of society, its institutions, its culture, its political order and its creed…from ignorance to Islam’.

It is hardly surprising, some believe, that in this atmosphere an alarming number of schoolchildren from Tower Hamlets have developed a craving to become jihadi warriors in Syria.

RAHMAN also got rid of his competent chief executive, and ordered that all grants over £1,000 must be decided by him. In 81 per cent of cases, council officer recommendations were overruled by Rahman or his cronies, who would cite ‘local knowledge’ as their reason for diverting millions away from non-Muslim groups.

When asked in council meetings why this was going on, Rahman hid behind claims it would ‘ breach his human rights’ to answer such inquiries.

While mayor, he also appointed a 100 per cent Bangladeshi and Muslim cabinet – even though the borough is only 34 per cent Muslim.

Rahman ignored the non-Bengali media but diverted thousands of pounds to Channel S, an influential TV station broadcasting to nearly half a million Bangladeshis, in return for fawning coverage.

Astonishingly, he even paid the station’s chief reporter, Mohammed Jubair, £1,050 a week as a part-time ‘community relations adviser’.

Rahman threatened to dispose of a Henry Moore artwork which offended Islamic sensibilities. The borough’s public libraries stocked large quantities of extremist literature.

He transferred valuable council property to close associates at far less than their true market value.

By the end, neither of the neighbouring boroughs – Hackney and Newham – would work with him. Yesterday, justice finally caught up with Luftur Rahman. He now faces ruin and could even be struck off as a solicitor.