THE TOXIC SCANDAL that could destroy Starmer’s Welsh First Minister before his reign’s even started
Welsh Labour is in turmoil (again) after it was revealed that its new leader accepted a vast donation from a businessman twice convicted of drowning the countryside in tonnes of industrial waste
‘The worst kind of disregard for nature’
HUGE earthworks tower over the Gwent Levels, an ancient wetland landscape that covers almost 30 miles of picturesque Welsh coastline, from Cardiff to Chepstow. Rising maybe 150ft, and extending for half-a-mile just east of the Welsh capital, these man-made mountains are shaped like slag heaps and crawled over daily by diesel-belching diggers.
The topsoil is riddled with rubble and concrete, plus the occasional car tyre and black bin-liner. Further inland, ramblers walking the coastal footpath have their view interrupted by vast piles of twisted metal. Local roads play host to a neverending stream of clattering HGVs.
All this was once fields, and despite outward appearances, it remains a designated ‘ Site of Special Scientific Interest’ (SSSI). After all, the Levels have for generations provided an internationally renowned habitat for rare insects and plants, along with a host of highly endangered bird species.
Then, sometime in the early 2000s, a local farmer named David John Neal decided to get into the waste- management business. Today, only a handful of sheep and cattle are required to graze the few fields that remain on his 120acre site. The rest resembles an industrial-scale rubbish tip.
The transformation has certainly been lucrative for the 63-year-old entrepreneur. His Dauson Environmental Group, which specialises in ‘recycling, demolition and soil remediation work’, made £4.8 million in its last financial year, giving him an estimated net worth of £41 million. According to Wales Business Insider magazine, that makes him the 66th-richest man west of Offa’s Dyke.
Yet, like many a self-made fellow, Neal has turned some very tight corners along the way. In fact, he turns out to be a twice-convicted criminal, with an ignoble track record — as the local landscape suggests — of brazenly flouting environmental law.
All of which explains why this once picturesque corner of rural Wales is now front and centre in one of the most fetid scandals in the country’s political history.
At the centre is Vaughan Gething, the newly installed Labour First Minister of Wales, who was this week (in circumstances we shall explore later) accused of lying to the Covid Inquiry.
Gething was elected in midMarch, following a close battle with Jeremy Miles, in which he managed to squeak home with 51.7 per cent of the vote.
It was a signature achievement, which made the half-Zambian former solicitor the first black leader of a European country. Yet crucially, and controversially, this narrow election victory followed a campaign that turns out to have been almost entirely financed by the aforementioned convicted criminal, David John Neal.
How so? Well, in December and January, the dodgy businessman handed Gething’s campaign two separate cheques, each for a cool £100,000, via his business, Dauson Environmental Group Limited.
The £200,000 — which equates to roughly 80 per cent of the £254,000 that Gething spent in total — counts as one of the biggest single donations in Welsh political history. To put it in context, his opponent Jeremy Miles was only able to raise £ 58,800 from all donors during the same period.
Or, as Professor Wyn Jones, a politics expert at Cardiff University, has put it, there is ‘simply no precedent’ for such an ‘ eyewateringly large sum… in the context of Welsh devolved politics’.
All of which raises two simple questions. First: why did Gething accept cash from a convicted criminal? Second: what was the questionable donor hoping to get from Gething in return?
And here’s where things get very murky indeed.
To understand why, one must consider a planning application that Neal submitted to the Welsh Government on January 11, the exact day he handed over the second of the £100,000 donations to the man he was helping to become First Minister.
It proposes building a 67-acre ‘solar park’ covering some of the last remaining green fields of his former farm in this hugely sensitive part of the Gwent Levels.
An environmental impact assessment submitted as part of the application concedes that the development will impact ‘a wetland landscape of international significance’, which is situated within both an SSSI and a ‘ site of importance for nature conservation’.
Yet, because the businessman has chosen to dub the project ‘a development of national significance’, the outcome of his potentially lucrative application will be determined not by local planning officers but, instead, by ministers from Gething’s own Government. Gething, it should be said, must recuse himself, or step aside, from the decision.
How will the £200,000 their boss received from the applicant affect their decision? Only time will tell.
That isn’t the only potential conflict of interest, either. For in recent weeks, a series of extraordinarily ugly revelations have emerged concerning Gething’s friendship with his political donor, whose company is based in his own constituency.
For example, documents unearthed by the BBC last month revealed that the First Minister of Wales has repeatedly lobbied on behalf of Neal and his businesses over a period of several years, despite his troubling relationship with the law.
In fact, Gething has frequently used his position in the Senedd — the Welsh parliament — to urge Natural Resources Wales (NRW), the quango that supposedly regulates the waste- disposal industry, to look more favourably upon his financial backer.
Neal certainly needed his assistance. In 2013, NRW was instrumental in prosecuting Neal for allowing toxic liquid to seep onto the Gwent Levels by knowingly taking waste on to the site that he was incapable of treating safely.
Cardiff Magistrates Court heard that the quango had teamed up with South Wales Police to carry out a year-long investigation into a million tonnes of industrial waste Neal was disposing of at the site, Ty-To- Maen Farm. They concluded that he had caused ‘substantial and serious pollution’. Neal was fined £10,000 and ordered to pay costs of £202,000.
Neal was also instructed to clean up the mess. But getting rid of toxic waste in a way that is even vaguely legal can be a hugely expensive business. He appears to have decided not to bother.
So it goes that NRW launched a second investigation in 2016. At this point, Vaughan Gething swung into action, writing a letter to the regulator saying he was ‘concerned’ at its treatment of Neal’s firm, adding: ‘It appears that broadly NRW has a closed
mind when it comes to achieving the requirements of the notice to improve the site.’
Despite the intervention, Neal was again prosecuted in 2017. This time, Cardiff Magistrates gave him an 18-week suspended jail sentence for continuing to despoil the local beauty spot and forced him to pay fines and costs of another £230,000.
Did that deter Gething from going into bat for his criminal chum? Chance would be a fine thing. Just a few months later, Gething was again lobbying NRW on Neal’s behalf.
In March 2018, he wrote to the regulator supporting his chum’s efforts to build a lucrative water treatment and biomass boiler on the site, saying: ‘I am not sure how further delay can be justified.’
Says Dr Catherine Linstrum, cochair of the Friends of the Gwent Levels: ‘Polluting the fragile and complex ecosystem of the Gwent Levels with toxic waste is a serious offence that highlights the very worst kind of disregard for nature.
‘The Levels have been used as a dumping ground by unscrupulous businesses and individuals for years. We expect our politicians to hold them to account, not take their money.’
Fast forward to last year, and things get murkier still.
By this stage, Gething, who had served as Health Minister during the pandemic, found himself with the economy brief.
That involved overseeing the Welsh Development Bank, which was created to jump-start the country’s moribund economy by lending taxpayer money to businesses.
One happy recipient during this period was the convicted criminal David John Neal. Last February, the bank — which seems to be losing around £60 million a year — decided to lend one of his firms £400,000 in order to fund the purchase of a solar farm.
Gething has denied having any individual involvement in that particular deal. But it nonetheless raises other questions. For example: why did Neal’s company need to take any public money, given that a few months later it had sufficent spare cash to be able to bung £200,000 to a politician?
More to the point, would the questionable businessman have made such huge cash donations to the future Labour First Minister were it not for the previous taxpayer-funded loan?
The scandal does not stop there. For Neal has lately been at the centre of several other bad news stories.
In recent weeks, it emerged that NRW is taking action against Withyhedge Landfill, a site that Neal runs in Pembrokeshire, which residents have dubbed a ‘stink bomb on steroids’.
What’s more, Atlantic Recycling, one of the companies based at his HQ on the Gwent Levels, was fined £300,000 in February and ordered to pay £29,000 costs for breaching the Health and Safety Act after a worker, Anthony Bilton, was killed in a collision with a large digger.
Judge Neal Thomas told Merthyr Tydfil magistrates there was ‘no excuse’ for its failings.
Perhaps understandably, the whole thing has caused a huge political row.
It took a more surreal turn earlier this month, after Welsh Labour narrowly voted down a motion to force an independent inquiry into the whole thing, when Gething promised instead to order a ‘review’.
However, the First Minister decided that the review should be carried out by Carwyn Jones, a veteran Labour politician and former Welsh First Minister regarded as one of Gething’s longstanding mentors.
Opposition parties nonetheless scent blood.
‘Sleaze has sadly been normalised in Westminster politics over the last few decades, which has denigrated our democracy,’ is how Plaid Cymru’s Rhun ap Iorwerth puts it. ‘Sadly, it now threatens to rear its head in Welsh politics through this donations saga, which continues to dominate the Labour First Minister’s first few weeks in office.
‘The First Minister either knew of the donor’s convictions and thought nothing of it or failed to undertake due diligence. [He] cannot just hope that putting a tin hat on will make the issue go away.’
Ominously for Gething, several leading Labour politicians are now breaking ranks to voice criticism of his decision to accept Neal’s money. Lee Waters, who served with him as deputy climate change minister, said last week that he was ‘struggling to process’ the whole thing, which he regarded as ‘unjustifiable and wrong’.
‘Two hundred thousand pounds is a staggering amount of money – unprecedented in Welsh politics... And the fact it came from a waste company with a conviction for damaging the Gwent Levels at a time when some of us were fighting hard to protect the sensitive area really shocked me, genuinely.’
A Senedd colleague, Labour’s Alun Davies, posted on social media that ‘ many Labour members agree with Lee’.
Speaking on condition of anonymity, one senior Labour figure told me: ‘ My view when I worked with him in the past is that he displays poor judgment and is too lazy to do due diligence. Given what is now happening, my view hasn’t changed.’
Gething, for his part, continues to insist that he has broken no rules, while Neal has issued a statement saying: ‘As a Welsh company, the Dauson Environmental Group has a wide number of operations and assets and is committed to investing in the future of Wales.
‘We want to see the economy, communities and environment continue to prosper in Wales, and we have supported Vaughan Gething’s campaign as we feel he is the best person for the job.’
Be that as it may, in Welsh Labour circles, where politicians have traditionally displayed group loyalty, there is a scent of regicide.
And Labour leader Keir Starmer will soon be dragged into the row after it emerged that, under Electoral Commission rules, cash left over from Gething’s campaign funds must now be transferred to Labour’s national bank account.
‘Keir now finds himself being forced to take cash from a convicted criminal, so this is now getting very uncomfortable for Labour at the UK level,’ is how one former Welsh Government minister puts it.
‘The other problem is that if Keir Starmer goes anywhere in Wales, which he needs to do during any forthcoming election, all he’ll now be asked about is Vaughan Gething. So at some point very soon, Labour’s high command — the Sue Grays [Starmer’s chief of staff] of this world — will have to decide whether he needs to go.’
Helping to force their hand may be a second ugly scandal which broke this week involving a leaked message Gething shared with fellow Ministers at the height of the Covid Pandemic.
In an ‘iMessage’ group being used to discuss policy with nine other members of the Welsh Cabinet, he wrote: ‘I’m deleting the messages in this group. They can be captured in an FOI [Freedom of Information request] and I think we are in the right place on the choice being made.’
That’s a very different tune to the one he was playing when he gave evidence to the Covid Inquiry under oath back in March.
During cross examination then, he insisted that a raft of messages that had apparently gone missing — and could not therefore be disclosed as evidence — had somehow been deleted by the Senedd’s IT team during a ‘security rebuild’.
He told inquiry chair Baroness Hallett that the lost information was ‘a matter of real embarrassment’ and that he regretted ‘all these messages are not available to you’.
Attempting to explain this apparent discrepancy, Gething has given a string of interviews this week. In one, he told BBC Wales that despite promising to delete messages he never actually bothered to do it ‘because I never had the time or inclination’.
In a second, he gave ITV’s Rob Osborne the impression that ‘the deleted messages had nothing to do with government decisions during the pandemic’.
Self- evidently, both excuses can’t simultaneously be true. Meanwhile, the inquiry says it is ‘considering whether it’s necessary to seek further evidence from Mr Gething’.
Ironically, the row comes only a few days after the Senedd debated a bill to criminalise lying by politicians.
Whether Mr Gething might one day fall foul of that regulation remains to be seen. But with trouble now looming on multiple fronts, and his own side starting to bay for blood, the Welsh First Minister increasingly looks like a dead man walking.
Starmer will soon be dragged into the row