The young upstart has put up a novel-length post cataloguing his skirmishes with the former monitoring officer, Laurence Harding.
Part of his exposition deals with the events at the full council on 13 December 2013, which just happened to be the first ever webcast meeting.
I had put down a notice of motion calling for members to be allowed access to files relating to the grant schemes in Pembroke Dock that had featured on my website.
That led to savage personal attacks by the leader Jamie Adams and cabinet member David Pugh.
This is part of what Pugh had to say:
“He’s escalated it through submissions to both the audit committee and Cabinet and a campaign of innuendo and smear tactics conducted on his Old Grumpy website and with selected press releases to the media.
Cabinet received a detailed rebuttal of all the spurious allegations made by Cllr Stoddart – allegations made without any evidence, just his unjustified opinions and self-proclaimed expertise.
These grant schemes have been subject to numerous audits including Welsh Government, Wales European Funding Office, Welsh Audit team, Heritage Lottery Fund and two internal PCC audits led by Jon Haswell reporting directly to our Director of Finance.
None of these audits found any evidence of wrongdoing, or alleged fraud.
Further to concerns raised by Cllr Stoddart a report was made to examine the specific allegations made.
Every single concern has been answered and a strong rebuttal made.”
And later: “There are many more spurious claims made – for none of which has he produced any evidence, purely conjecture and speculation.” and “But, then, getting at the truth is not on his agenda.”
The complete transcript of what Pugh had to say, together with my comments, can be found here.
The whole of the proceedings can be viewed here (Agenda item 10).
Cllr Adams’ attack on Cllr Paul Miller (Agenda item 9) is also worth a look if only to show that the title Kremlin on Cleddau requires no poetic licence.
Like me, you might find it difficult to reconcile Pugh’s contemptuous dismissal of my claims with the fact that, just over four months later, the council handed a fat dossier to the police detailing some £80,000 worth of grants that had been misallocated and, a couple of months after that, it was forced to repay £309,000 to the Wales European Funding Office (WEFO).
This all starts with a report on the grant schemes that went to the audit committee in September 2013 following a request by Cllr Michael Williams who had been reading my website.
The report gave the grant scheme a clean bill of health “…that there were adequate and effective compliance arrangements in place for both grant schemes, which had been complied with. This view had also been expressed by the Council’s Monitoring Officer who was in attendance at the meeting.”
Having received this report three days before the audit committee meeting, and come to the conclusion it was a complete whitewash, I forwarded a detailed document to members of the audit committee listing my many allegations of irregularities, one of which was that the whole of the roof at Coronation School Pembroke Dock had not been reslated, though the cost of the whole roof had been included in the final account.
Unfortunately this arrived too late for consideration at the audit committee meeting so I submitted a notice of motion to the October meeting of full council calling for the files on these projects to be opened up for inspection.
That was remitted to the cabinet meeting on 2 December 2012, when, as part of the debate, the director of finance provided a line by line refutation of my allegations.
Predictably, after being told by the director of finance that everything I’d said was untrue and that: “The whole roof was stripped off and recovered in a mixture of new and recycled natural slate on new felt and battens. These works commenced in May 2010 and were completed in July 2010 with the works to the chimney stacks happening at the same time the roof was stripped” the cabinet unanimously agreed to recommend to full council that my notice of motion be rejected.
Buoyed up by this assurance and accompanied by the quantity surveyor who had supervised the projects, Adams and Pugh made a quick trip to Pembroke Dock in order to gather the evidence that could be used to destroy my credibility when my NoM came before the council meeting on December 13.
That was when “confirmation bias” kicked in because everything the quantity surveyor told them fitted what they wanted to believe and inspired Pugh’s almost wholly mendacious diatribe (above).
But it went a stage further to what psychologists refer to as “noble cause corruption” which happens when you become so certain of the rightness of your case that you feel justified in telling lies to support it.
So Adams and Pugh told the council meeting on December 12 that they had been up in the attic at Coronation school and seen for themselves that the whole of the roof had been reslated.
The power of this confirmation bias/noble cause corruption phenomenon can be judged from the fact that, just a month before this council meeting, the photograph below of the “recently reslated” roof had appeared on my website.
Indeed such was Pugh’s confidence in what the quantity surveyor had told him was kosher that, immediately following this trip to Pembroke Dock, he wrote to the Ombudsman complaining that my conduct was bringing the office of councillor into disrepute.
If you need something to cheer you up in these dark days of January, I recommend you read Pugh’s complaint in the light of what transpired in the following weeks and months.
In the fullness of time I was able to prove that it wasn’t possible to see the whole of the inside of the roof from two available access points.
It doesn’t seem to have occurred to these two that the person who had supervised these projects might have an interest in telling them that all was in order.
Nor, it seems, did they pause to wonder if I would be so stupid as to publish potentially libellous allegations on my website unless I had strong evidence to back them up.
Sadly for them, presented with what seemed like a golden opportunity to give me a good kicking, they completely lost their heads and scored a spectacular own goal.
It is difficult to believe that two of the people charged with controlling the council’s £300 million budget should show such woeful judgement and lack of regard for the truth.
The council’s director of finance Jon Haswell, who presented the report to cabinet on 2 December 2013, now seems to have had second thoughts.
In an email last year he told me:
“In regard to whether the “whole” of the roof had been reslated on new felt and battens, I would no longer state the word “whole”. I was advised by the Quantity Surveyor that the “whole” of the roof had been reslated on new felt and battens, hence its inclusion in the report.
I have since had to question a number of things I was advised by the Quantity Surveyor, hence the reason I would no longer state the word “whole”.
Note that Mr Haswell is questioning “a number of things” not just the roof at Coronation School.
Of course, you might think the time for questioning the quantity surveyor’s credibility was before the report was written, but, it seems, even highly paid council officers are not immune from “confirmation bias”.
At least Mr Haswell had the good sense to change his mind when presented with the facts, but not our two cabinet titans.
Indeed the writing was on the wall (literally) within a few days of the December 2013 meeting of council, when I demonstrated that “the third side elevation”; cited by Cllr Pugh as evidence that I had got my calculations wrong over the rendering at 25 Dimond Street, was figment of his imagination, or, more correctly, the quantity surveyor’s imagination.
In February 2014 Cllr Jacob Williams and I provided evidence to the director of finance of serious irregularities in the tender process for 10 Meyrick Street.
The council informed the police and in April 2014 a detailed dossier was forwarded to the fraud squad.
In the meantime, I put down a motion of no confidence in Pugh at the meeting of full council on 6 March.
Despite it being known that what Pugh had told the council on 13 December 2013 was largely a pack of lies, he scraped home by 24-22 thanks to the votes of the IPPG faithful, aided and abetted by Cllrs Mike Evans and Phil Kidney (both unaffiliated). (See minutes agenda item 166).