Town hall despot booted out over vote-rigging plot
Bold campaigners expose corruption
BRITAIN’S first elected Muslim mayor was sacked 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 ballot-rigging.
Rahman, a Bangladeshi-born ex-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 challenge was launched by the four 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.
Yesterday, electoral judge Rich- ard 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.
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’ and forging postal votes. He also bribed Muslim voters with money diverted from groups such as the Alzheimer’s Society and said 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 pathological liar who had ‘driven a coach and horses’ through the l aw. But he
‘Fraud on an industrial scale
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 key documents.
Mr Erlam has worked as an elections monitor in Africa, yet said he had been astonished at the scale of vote-fixing in his home borough.
After yesterday’s victory at the High Court, he said: ‘There was industrialscale 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’.
He had ‘quite obviously’ rounded up people to testify in his favour and handed them ready-written 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.’
London Mayor Boris Johnson said: ‘I’m very glad 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 Rahman.