Chandeliers, cronies, £33k of paint – and a whistleblower hounded for exposing naked greed
Not LoNG ago, a very senior staff member at Her Majesty’s Commonwealth typed a letter to about a dozen influential diplomats in London. the document was headlined ‘Protected Disclosure’, a legal term used to describe confidential information being shared under the Public Interest Disclosure Act, which helps whistleblowers to avoid prosecution.
Eight pages long, it contained explosive, first-hand revelations relating to a major scandal involving what it described as ‘procurement, transparency, and the use of public funds in the Commonwealth’.
this thorny topic was already a talking point in diplomatic circles, thanks largely to a series of Daily Mail revelations.
over a period of months, we’d published shocking details about the spending habits of the new Commonwealth Secretary General, the Labour peer and former Cabinet minister Baroness Scotland.
thanks to leaked documents, we’d been able to reveal how this close friend of Cherie Blair was handing out lucrative publicly funded jobs to political cronies.
She had, for example, hired two Leftwing political fixers (paid £16,000 a month), along with fellow Labour peer Lord Patel, whose personal firm received £30,000 a month to provide ‘strategic advice’.
In July, we revealed plans by Baroness Scotland to spend hundreds of thousands of pounds on her grace-and-favour Mayfair home in a fashion reminiscent of the days when some MPs were caught using taxpayers’ money to drain their moats or buy luxury poultry houses.
We’d been leaked detailed spreadsheets which set out her wish- list for the property make- over, which was being partly orchestrated by the celebrity interior designer Nicky Haslam.
It included £33,000 worth of luxury paint, £100-a-roll wallpaper, a £5,000 vanity unit, £11,000 on a ‘ladies’ powder room’ and a £1,200 bill for ‘relocating a chandelier’ from the sitting room to her swanky new dining area.
BAroNESS Scotland’s profligacy became headline news again this week after a leaked letter revealed her organisation is in a ‘dire financial position’ with insufficient funds to see it much past the New Year. Amid accusations of cronyism and venality, it emerged that several Commonwealth nations, including India, are considering whether to withdraw funding, while British MPs have called for a Commons probe of her use of public funds.
Downing Street is now believed to be increasingly troubled by her behaviour, and senior Cabinet figures are said to be looking at possible ways to engineer her removal from office.
Significantly, the PM has withdrawn personal support for Baroness Scotland, with a spokesman four times refusing this week to say if she enjoys theresa May’s backing. Meanwhile, the Queen, who as official Head of the Commonwealth hopes the organisation will be one of her greatest legacies, is understood to be watching the unfolding scandal with concern.
All of which brings us to yesterday morning when, in an olympic class display of shamelessness, the Baroness pitched up on radio 4’s today programme to claim there had been ‘no extravagance’ during her tenure, and that the Mail’s reports of her spending habits were ‘just untrue’ and ‘absolute nonsense’.
this epic display of obfuscation is detailed on this page (see panel). But almost all of the Baroness’s claims are at odds with those laid out in documents leaked to us from within the Commonwealth in recent months.
Exhibit A, on this front, is the eightpage ‘ Protected Disclosure’ letter, sent last month to London-based High Commissioners of Commonwealth nations. Its author was a 43-year-old Indian called ram Venuprasad, who has worked at the Commonwealth’s HQ near Buckingham Palace for 17 years. During his career, he
rose through the ranks to become deputy head of Office to the Secretary General, where he was able to watch at close hand Baroness Scotland’s stewardship, which began in April.
His letter provides a fascinating account of life under the Baroness, who is nicknamed ‘ Patsy’ by Commonwealth staff due to her similarity to Patsy Stone, the extravagant but toxic protagonist in Absolutely Fabulous, and the fact that her first name is Patricia.
It also provides eye- opening details of unorthodox spending said to have been paid under her command. The saga starts prior to Baroness Scotland taking office, when he says the high- earning barrister who was Britain’s first black QC ‘indicated that she was unhappy’ with her salary package.
She’d been offered the same pay deal as her predecessor, the Indian diplomat Kamalesh Sharma. It was £160,000 a year, along with the use of an official car and driver and use of a vast grace-and-favour home in Mayfair.
However, as an expat, Sharma got many generous extra allowances to reflect the costs of life in a foreign country.
Though she lived in Chiswick, West London, it’s claimed that Baroness Scotland felt she ought to get the same allowances — particularly as she said she’d ‘given up other offers which were financially more remunerative’. Indeed, it was said she ‘refused to sign the terms and conditions’ in the Commonwealth’s ‘initial letter of offer’.
What’s more, Baroness Scotland said the fact she hadn’t been offered the same allowances as the outgoing Secretary General was sexism, since it meant that she was being ‘discriminated against vis-avis her male predecessors’, the document states.
Apparently anxious to avoid allegations of misogyny, the Commonwealth’s most senior executive, Gary Dunn, ‘revised’ her financial package.
In his letter, Venuprasad says the pay deal was upgraded to include a ‘ special’ cash allowance, paid ‘home leave’ (not to cover the cost of taking her family to their home in Chiswick, but to fly them to Dominica, in the Caribbean, where she was born and lived until the age of three months), and an ‘educational allowance,’ supposedly to contribute to her children’s school fees, despite them being post-school age.
Dunn also decided to re-imburse Baroness Scotland, who is a UK taxpayer, with the cost of her National Insurance payments.
Although clearly embarrassed by these revelations, Commonwealth bosses did not comment on the details of Venuprasad’s allegations — save to say that the package was signed off by her predecessor, Mr Sharma, ‘who proposed the basis on which future post- holders should be remunerated’.
It added: ‘As part of the accepted package, it does not matter from which country, what nationality or what gender this Secretary General or future Secretaries General are.’ Either way, all the allowances were generous considering she was taking a job in her home city. What’s more, they were certainly generous compared with the pay she offered her own household staff.
For, notoriously, when she was the Attorney General in Gordon Brown’s government she was forced to pay a £5,000 fine in 2009 after it emerged that she had employed a Tongan illegal immigrant as a housekeeper at her £2 million home.
The Tongan woman, later jailed, was paid a mere £6 an hour.
FAST forward to this year, and having successfully feathered her own nest, Baroness Scotland swiftly began enriching an array of her cronies. First up was Lord Patel, a Parliamentary chum with whom she’d been on overseas visits.
Despite his having no obvious experience of management consultancy or international affairs, she hired him as her ‘change manager’ to ‘ undertake an independent review’ of the Commonwealth’s corporate structure.
Venuprasad, author of that whistleblower letter to High Commissioners, caught wind of this proposed appointment two months before Baroness Scotland was due to start work at the Commonwealth Secretariat. He says he advised her to put the job out to tender, rather than simply adding her pal’s firm to the payroll, so as not to risk being accused of misusing public funds.
Specifically, he said he believed it would be unsuitable for Commonwealth money to be spent hiring ‘a fellow member of the House of Lords who also shared her political affiliation’, without a proper recruitment process.
According to his Protected Disclosure, the Baroness replied ‘that she had a long and trusted relationship with Lord Patel’, so would not follow his advice.
It emerged that Patel’s company KYA Global — which is registered to his address in Bradford and has no listed directors aside from his wife — would get £30,000 a month for its services.
Venuprasad sought to intervene again, advising the Commonwealth’s most senior executive Gary Dunn to ‘follow proper procurement procedures’ by putting the job out to tender first.
However the contract with Patel’s firm was approved, with Dunn agreeing to sign a ‘waiver from preferred procurement practices’ to avoid it having to be being advertised elsewhere. He said the ‘key requirements’ of Patel’s job and
‘urgency of its commencement’ meant that ‘a waiver to the usual rules is permissible’.
Next up came the appointments of Baroness Scotland’s acquaintances Joe Phelan, an executive at PR firm Weber Shandwick, and Matthew Doyle, a former aide to Tony Blair. They began work with her on the day she took office, and were described to Commonwealth staff as new ‘special advisors’.
Baffled by their presence at meetings and official functions normally restricted to a select group, and uncertain of the duo’s exact role, Venuprasad says that he made inquiries about their status.
It emerged that, unlike normal employees, the men had yet to sign contracts or other documents detailing their duties or remuneration.
The Baroness then arranged for Dunn to ‘issue retroactive contracts’ stating that Doyle and Phelan would be paid £16,000 a month — a sum greater than that earned by the Prime Minister.
Venuprasad says he warned Scotland and Dunn about ‘the excessive money paid to these two special advisors when the Secretariat could ill afford such expensive appointments’, adding ‘this was an inappropriate use of public resources’.
He said in his letter to High Commissioners: ‘The monies paid to Lord Patel’s company and the two special advisors for the first three months in the SG’s [Secretary General’s] tenure totalled £192,000.’ He also pointed out that the figure equated to ‘ approximately 1.5 per cent of the total Commonwealth Secretariat’s annual budget.’
By now, the Mail was asking awkward questions about how Baroness Scotland’s previous work as a lawyer might affect her suitability for office. It also became clear that both Doyle and Phelan were inextricably linked with that work.
In 2012, she earned £7,500 a day providing legal advice to the vile despot in charge of the Maldives — who has locked up almost 2,000 opposition activists and jailed three leaders of opposition parties.
Then in April, on her first day at the Commonwealth, she had agreed to hold private meetings with Azima Shukoor, the dictatorship’s former Attorney General, the person who signed off on the contract for her legal work in 2012.
Human rights activists — who had naively hoped that Baroness Scotland would publicly censure the Maldives — were concerned that this was a potential conflict of interest. Yet when the Mail put this to Scotland, she issued a statement, seemingly co-drafted by Matthew Doyle, claiming that the meeting had been scheduled by her predecessor.
In his ‘Protected Disclosure’, Venuprasad says that this claim was utterly false and that he informed the Baroness it ‘was incorrect to say so, as no meeting was set up’ with her predecessor. In fact, he had delegated it to the Commonwealth’s Deputy Secretary General, Dr Josephine Ojiambo.’
However, he adds: ‘The Secretary General was dismissive of this advice and told Mr Doyle the [statement to the Mail] should be retained as it was.’ Meanwhile, Phelan was taking a personal interest in other matters close to Scotland’s heart.
Indeed, leaked documents have shown that his duties ranged from advising on the lavish refurbishment of her grace-and-favour home, to attempting to persuade cash-strapped officials to find ‘other options’ to finance the project.
In May, he emailed Venuprasad saying the Baroness wanted to hold a garden party celebrating her appointment. Budgets in the region of £50,000 were suggested. Venuprasad replied that ‘the Secretariat is a publicly funded institution and the budget for this party was an excessive and inappropriate use of public resources’.
THe eventual cost is not known, because Commonwealth spokesmen have refused to say. They have also declined to disclose exactly how much has been spent refurbishing the grace-and-favour home, though Baroness Scotland said yesterday that it would be ‘maybe £330,000’ some £100,000 more than the initial budget.
even if they were to name an exact sum, it’s increasingly difficult to know whether to believe what Baroness Scotland’s spin doctors say.
After all, a few weeks ago, Barnie Choudhury, a PR hired by the Baroness this summer (who is an old mate of Patel), told the Mail that Phelan and Doyle ‘ are not paid £16,000 a month or anything like that’. He was apparently unaware the Mail had a copy of each of their employment contracts, in which the £16,000-a-month salary is stated clearly.
For all the bluster, we know that her profligate spending has helped to drive her organisation deep into a financial crisis. Recently, Commonwealth nations were told Baroness Scotland had called an emergency board meeting to discuss its ‘dire financial position’ which has ‘ deteriorated since the last board meeting’.
This was cancelled only after the Baroness was humiliatingly forced into lobbying member states to make prompt contributions to its funds, leading to assurances being ‘received from at least one big contributor that they will expedite payment of the dues’. Details of this, which became public this week, sparked calls for a formal external audit of its finances.
As for Baroness Scotland, she has worked doggedly behind the scenes to attempt to stifle reporting of her profligacy. In June, when the Mail first told the Commonwealth it had obtained leaked documents detailing her spending, she hired celebrity lawyer Mark Stephens to write to us, seeking to block publication of their contents on the grounds that ‘reporting is in apparent breaches of the Data Protection Act’.
Then senior executive Gary Dunn wrote a threatening email to all Commonwealth staff, advising that the management had decided to ‘instigate an internal review’ to identify the source of leaks to the Press and stated that they risked ‘dismissal and/or prosecution’ if they were caught breaching the organisation’s ‘confidentiality’.
In mid- June, the internal review claimed its first scalp: Venuprasad was summoned to a meeting and accused of being responsible for leaking internal documents, an allegation he vehemently denies.
According to the Protected Disclosure he submitted, he was suspended from duty on June 22. Five months on, his status is unclear, although the Mail understands he is still on the Commonwealth payroll.
Meanwhile, the Commonwealth Secretariat did not respond in detail to many wider questions asked by the Mail in relation to Ram Venuprasad’s allegations, except to refuse to comment on ‘contracts or leaked documents’ and to describe his Protected Disclosure as ‘ a whole series of allegations made by a profoundly disaffected individual who is facing serious disciplinary charges’.
They are, of course, entitled to defend the free-spending Baroness, who this week has been in Singapore (her office have refused to say whether she travelled first class).
But her talk of ‘extravagance’ does little to hide a pressing fact: that increasing numbers of senior government figures, across the Commonwealth, feel ‘profoundly disaffected’ about her tenure at an institution which the Queen this year proudly said ‘acts for the common good’.