If you want to understand how the establishment engineer their trademark cover-ups, you won’t find a better tutorial than the webcast of the extraordinary meeting of Pembrokeshire County Council’s governance and audit committee on September 10 2024.
Weeks earlier, at its May 8 extraordinary meeting, the committee resolved to exercise one of its more potent statutory powers.
This rare move required certain officers and elected members to appear before it to answer questions and account for their part in the events of 2013/2014, when widespread fraud in the Pembroke Dock commercial property grant scheme (CPGS) first came to light on the pages of this blog.
One of the officers hauled before last month’s meeting was Mr Gwyn Evans, who at the relevant time headed up PCC’s European Department which was responsible for the administration of the CPGS.
A barrister engaged by the council to explore PCC’s prospects of mounting a private prosecution had advised that, while there was clearly fraud, it would not be appropriate for the council to prosecute because the fraud had been facilitated by the incompetence (at best) or complicity (at worst) of officers in Mr Evans’ department.
The hearings were chaired by Dr Norma Barry, one of the nine-member committee’s three lay members (non councillors) required by statute.
Being a lay member has the advantage of not being accountable to those pesky voters – and Dr Barry was keen to exploit her privileged position to close down any examination of the events back in 2013/2014 when these grant frauds first came to light.
One of the favoured tactics of those promoting a cover-up is to concentrate on the future while brushing the past under the carpet.
I recently came across a report from the Post Office Horizon IT Inquiry, which probed the much-publicised scandal involving the private prosecutions of sub-postmasters where this tactic was used. Chief Executive Nick Read told the inquiry that Ben Foat, the PO’s top lawyer, had advised him that:
“Private prosecutions [against hundreds of sub-postmasters] were an historic issue that had ceased before 2015 and that I did not need to dig into the details of what had happened at the Post Office in the past as this conduct had ended.”
This injunction to forget the past and concentrate on the future is the standard modus operandi of the cover-up merchants.
The future is their ideal playground because, beyond the trivial, there are no facts about the future, so they are able to spin whatever yarns they like.
For example, way back in September 2013, when this grant fraud caper put in its first official appearance, the audit committee was told:
“Internal Audit has shared its findings with the Council’s Monitoring Officer who is satisfied that there is no evidence of maladministration or non-compliance with the governance arrangements relevant to the specific schemes or of any lack of competence in officers concerned with the administration of the schemes.”
The day when I would force the council to allow me full access to the files on these grant projects was five months in the future, and when the future came round – and I was able to show that not only was there maladministration, but wholesale fraud – the authority forwarded a fat dossier of evidence to the police.
Chairing her first meeting only minutes after being elected chair of the governance and audit committee, Dr Barry has proven to be a master of the art of brushing past sins under the carpet.
Here she is just 22 minutes into proceedings:
“The recommendation from officers is that we should satisfy ourselves at today’s meeting that lessons have been learned and current processes are robust. And I would like to stress that it is not our role to question the performance of individual officers and we will need to be conscious of our duty of care to those officers.
Now, officers can recommend all they like, but it is committee members who decide what gets done, and it is difficult to understand the point of compelling officers to appear before the committee if members weren’t allowed to question their evidence and performance, but any doubt about Dr Barry’s views was removed when, 1 hour and 32 minutes into the webcast, she told the probing Cllr Jacob Williams:
“We’re not carrying out a cross examination of officers which I think is quite inappropriate for the committee to be cross examining officers in this way.”
And 3.06 into the webcast, when she told me:
“I’m sorry Cllr Stoddart, we can’t be criticising officers in a public forum, it’s not appropriate. If we can just move on.”
Earlier in the meeting (2.04) she interjected to say:
“I mean, Mr [Gwyn] Evans has actually held his hand up that there could have been closer management of staff. Mistakes were made and nobody is disputing that those mistakes were made. But, as a committee our concern should be that lessons were learned, that we’ve got robust processes in place and that those processes are being implemented effectively.”
This was a classical example of goalpost relocation because the issue wasn’t staff management, nor whether mistakes had been made, but whether these “mistakes” were either part of a deliberate deception designed to conceal the truth during the early stages of my investigation into this affair; or that they were the sort of errors that any competent officer would have avoided; or even that they were evidence that council officers had been complicit in these frauds.
In my next post, I will provide evidence that most of what Mr Evans told the committee had only a tenuous connection with the truth. Unfortunately, because we were not allowed to cross examine his evidence, his statements, for the moment, stand as facts.