CEO must stand aside - mayor
Horowhenua mayor Michael Feyen is calling for his council’s chief executive to stand aside while an investigation is carried out into controversial email blocking and interception practices.
An internal draft audit report leaked to media reveals emails were intercepted by chief executive David Clapperton – a process labelled ‘‘extremely high risk’’.
The report shows the council boss screened emails sent to staff, as well as elected members, including Feyen.
Feyen said issues raised in that report needed to be looked at and Clapperton should stand aside in the meantime.
The council is getting the report peer-reviewed, but has already labelled it incomplete and ‘‘not up to standard’’.
Feyen had planned to call for the sidelining of Clapperton at a council meeting scheduled for Wednesday night. But the meeting was cancelled because six councillors called in sick.
‘‘Due to councillor illness there wouldn’t be enough for a quorum,’’ Feyen said he was told by council staff.
He had planned a ‘‘lastditch effort’’ to encourage councillors to work with him to resolve issues raised in the report.
At the same time, he intended to ‘‘keep my foot on the throat’’ by requesting an independent investigation funded by central government.
On Monday, council spokeswoman Lacey Wilson said the audit draft ‘‘was not up to standard’’, was not accepted by the council and would not be officially released.
It was being reviewed by KPMG, but it was not clear when this would be completed.
Clapperton was unavailable for comment on Wednesday, but said previously that email blocking was ‘‘necessary to protect my employees so they can carry out their roles safely without undue interference, inappropriate criticism, and racist slurs’’.
The council also apologised after misinforming the public.
Council staff had said an automatic notification was sent to any person whose email was diverted. However, a number of people whose email addresses were blocked said they had not received the replies.
Radio New Zealand reported the council had now confirmed a reply was not sent in all cases. The council has not yet directly replied to the Standard’s previous queries about this, but did apologise for the misinformation to RNZ.
A statement from deputy mayor Wayne Bishop, released on behalf of all councillors except for Ross Campbell, said the nine councillors still supported Clapperton.
‘‘My colleagues and I wish to publicly acknowledge our support for council chief executive David Clapperton,’’ he said.
The councillors were not intending to read the audit report until it had been peer-reviewed.
Feyen admitted he knew emails were being blocked during Brendan Duffy’s mayoralty, which ended last year, as Duffy had informed him. Feyen and Campbell stopped receiving mayoral update emails from Duffy.
He also noticed other ‘‘odd’’ issues with his emails, such as notifications that the system was down and emails were undeliverable, but did not know what to make of it.
Feyen ‘‘suspected’’ something suspicious was happening with his emails, but he didn’t know emails from other people were being redirected, he said.
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