AADHIKARonline quoting the item from the website of the London ‘EVENING STANDARD’ as accessed at 1330 Hrs GMT on Monday 10 December 2007
Second Ken aide linked to City Hall cash scandal
A second senior aide to Ken Livingstone had a personal interest in an organisation that received substantial sums from City Hall and is unable to account for the money.
According to official records, the Deshbangla Foundation has never declared any income or filed any accounts, and all the money paid to it by the Mayor's London Development Agency appears to have vanished.
The foundation is directly associated with Kumar Murshid, who was the Mayor's senior adviser on regeneration and was also a member of the LDA board at the time of the grants.
The development comes after the Evening Standard revealed that Lee Jasper, the Mayor's adviser on equalities and policing, is under investigation by the Greater London Authority, after at least £2.5 million of City Hall money was channelled to organisations linked to himself, his friends and his business associates.
Mr Jasper and Mr Murshid, 52, were friends and colleagues. Mr Murshid was co-chairman of the National Assembly Against Racism, which has received at least £168,200 in funding from City Hall and whose secretary is Mr Jasper.
Mr Murshid was also a co-director with Mr Jasper of Operation Black Vote, and an executive member of the Black Londoners Forum, another Jasper-linked organisation that has received at least £291,500 from the Mayor.
Mr Murshid, a senior Mayoral adviser on the same level as Mr Jasper, resigned all his posts after he was charged with theft in a separate case involving his work as a Tower Hamlets councillor. He stood trial but was acquitted.
He is now attempting to re-enter London politics and has sought selection as a parliamentary candidate. Mr Livingstone remains a firm supporter of Mr Murshid and held a private meeting with him as recently as 19 March.
London Assembly answers and LDA annual reports show that the Deshbangla Foundation received at least £30,000 in LDA grants - £20,000 in 2001/02 and £10,000 in 2003/04.
Its claimed purpose was to train Bangladeshi students in TV production. However, official records at the Charity Commission show the Deshbangla Foundation did not exist in 2001/02. By 2003/04 it did exist, but claimed in its annual returns to the Charity Commission that it neither received nor spent any money in that financial year, or in any other year. It has never filed accounts for any year and its last contact with the Charity Commission was in August last year.
Omar Imam, secretary of the Deshbangla Foundation, told the Standard he only joined the charity after 2004, after the LDA grants, and had no knowledge of its finances before.
However, he said Mr Murshid had been closely involved in the foundation and in its sister organisation, Deshbangla TV, at the time of the grants. "The founders approached him to organise the TV station and the people they should meet," Mr Imam said.
He said he did not know whether any of the meetings arranged by Mr Murshid were about funding. Mr Murshid claimed to the Standard that he had never had "any formal, or indeed informal involvement in any capacity" with the Deshbangla Foundation, saying his involvement had been with the TV station only.
However, the LDA annual report for 2003/04 makes clear Mr Murshid did declare an "associated interest in Deshbangla Foundation".
The TV station and the foundation shared the same office and the same web address and Mr Imam told us: "Deshbangla Foundation and Deshbangla TV are basically the same thing."
Mr Murshid later admitted to the Standard: "Whatever associated interest I have was made very clear - to the extent that Deshbangla TV had some relationship with the foundation, one might make that kind of association." He said the LDA grant to the Foundation "was for training purposes, from what I recall". But he vehemently denied receiving personal gain, saying he had never run the foundation and did not know where the money had gone.
He sidestepped questions as to whether he had played any part in winning the LDA grants.
Mr Murshid's trial involved the alleged illegal diversion of funds intended for victims of arsenic poisoning in Bangladesh. Some of his codefendants also pleaded guilty to charges involving the diversion of funds from another grant, by Tower Hamlets council, to Deshbangla TV.
Mr Murshid was acquitted of all charges and blamed a smear campaign by political opponents. However, during the run-up to the case it emerged that he had failed to declare his interest in Deshbangla TV, and he was censured for it by Tower Hamlets.
The Standard put a series of written questions about the Deshbangla Foundation to the LDA more than a week ago, including questions about how the grant was audited, what outcomes it produced, and Mr Murshid's role in securing it, but the LDA refused to respond.
• Pressure was building on adviser Lee Jasper today with calls for a full inquiry from all sides of the London Assembly. Labour member John Biggs, who is on the board of the London Development Agency which paid many of the grants, called for a "thorough" probe. Assembly chairman Sally Hamwee (Lib-Dem) said: "The proper thing to do would be for the Mayor to call in an independent investigator." Baroness Hamwee is also acting chair of the budget committee and on the economic development committee, which are carrying out inquiries into LDA grants. She said the LDA "did not respond" to many of their requests for information.
WHO RECEIVED THE MONEY
Projects associated with Mr Jasper and his friends which have received money from the GLA, LDA or TfL:
• Brixton Base - at least £535,000
• Black Londoners Forum/Afroice - at least £291,000
• 1990 Trust - at least £151,200
• African Caribbean Business Network - at least £990,000 paid or promised
• European Federation of Black Women Business Owners - at least £25,000
• Diversity International - at least £295,000
• North West One Charitable Trust - at least £25,000
• National Assembly Against Racism/London Assembly Against Racism - at least £168,200
• Deshbangla Foundation - at least £30,000
• Community Advice Project - at least £6,000, possibly £206,000
• BEM Community Enterprise - unknown, but likely to be substantial
TOTAL: at least £2,516,900
AADHIKARonline unquoting the item from the website of the London ‘EVENING STANDARD’ as accessed at 1330 Hrs GMT o

THE MUHAMMAD HAQUE DAILY ETHICAL COMMENTARY, examining ANDREW GILLIGAN’S ‘explanations’ as carried on the ‘guardian’s’ ‘comment is free’ web site, in response to KEN LIVINGSTONE’S attacks on him……

By©Muhammad Haque
2045 Hrs GMT
London Saturday 15 December 2007

To set the scene for that examination, it is important first to take a brief look at the hilariously [!!!] corrupting ‘communist’ ‘Morning Star’ [that was said to be the organ of the erstwhile CPGB, the ‘communist’ party of great Britain’ during the existence of the ussr].

Published from London, the ‘communist’ ‘Morning Star’ is a most curious ‘communist’ ‘organ’.

In the UK, it is allied with some of the most corrupt time-servers both in the formal parliamentary populations as well as in some of the still power-wielding British trade union bureaucracies.

The title is not known for democratic practices. As part of a most mysterious arrangement with the elements that are loosely referred to as ‘Stalinists’ in Britain, the ‘Morning Star’ gives frequent space and platform to the likes of Ken Livingstone.

He is presented in a way that makes him appears on the pages of the ‘ ‘Morning Star’ regularly as if Livingstone represented some ideological independence from the main package being peddled by and via the network of corrupt bureaucracies that is in effect what the role has been of the former Labour party now operated as the Blaired party and its apparatuses in the UK.


This is evident in the timing, the contents and the agenda underlying their appearances in the ‘Morning Star’ ...

As does the incident of Livingstone’s platform given in the ‘Morning Scar’ today, Saturday 15 December 2007.


This is a lengthy piece by-lined to Livingstone himself, making all manner of fabricated claims about his [Livingstone] achievements in London ‘progressive politics’.

Livingstone is behaving in his amoral ‘belief’ that he is above even being reported in a news investigating concerning the various allegations about the use and abuse of public funds that are allocated or not from organisations for which he has assumed Blair-aided powers.

Livingstone owes his entire ‘London mayoral empire’ to Tony Blair!

More of that will come out in the weeks and months that remain before the scheduled four yearly elections for mayor due to be held in May 2008.

The crisis that Ken Livingstone is now facing is linked with the questions that have now been raised in parts of the media – not widely enough yet – about his abuse of public offices in the name of parts of London. Livingstone is not a bright man in the universally understood sense. He is a crafty man. He is also not a compassionate one. The result is that in less than three months since the actual appearance of Boris Johnson as a ‘name’ that has reportedly come anywhere near the propaganda level matching that of Livingstone himself, the true colours of Ken Livingstone have started to appear from under the surface. This is a time when Livingstone is experiencing the most pressures.

The likes of which he has not experienced before. Never before in the career that he has manufactured in the name of the various London boroughs has Livingstone looked at the prospect of being rejected and kicked out of the public office e he craves and revels in!

And at the expense of so many strategically ‘vulnerable’ communities and peoples in them!

This time, there does seem to be a real likelihood that Livingstone has actually come across evidence, somewhere, somehow, that he can no longer fool the majority of the electorate into thinking that he is not yet another lying opportunistic, time-serving ‘politician’.

Whatever the actual outcome of any election that may be held in May 2008, the Ken Livingstone that was promoted even by the Rupert Murdoch Times ‘columnist’ Matthew Parris as being invincible beyond all known records, trends and tendencies of political careerists in the UK , is not looking like a real person any more.

Not after Livingstone’s behaviour in response to and in relation to the particular Andrew Gilligan-authored reports this past week as carried by the London EVENING STANDARD.

The fantasy Ken Livingstone that had been fabricated by Matthew Parris, must now be condemned to the dustbin where it always belonged.





[To be continued]

Even the 'Livingstone-aiding' 'Morning Star' confesses to Ken gloom ahead

By©Muhammad Haque
1630 Hrs GMT
London Saturday 22 December 2007

Today’s edition of the ‘Ken Livingstone-aiding' so-called daily newspaper of the British left [who they?] 'Morning Star' confesses to their London grant-aid-empire-controlling ‘leader’ Ken Livingstone facing a critical challenge at the scheduled May 2008 mayoral ‘elections’.

The Morning Scar has come to the realisation allegedly after looking at the results of a by-election held on Thursday in a Hackney London Borough council ward where the Ca-Moron Conservatives thrashed not only the Blaired party but almost eliminated the Morning Scar’s own party candidate to a mere 37 votes!

[To be continued]

Here it is, as accessed 16 jan 2008


 http://www.dailymail.co.uk/pages/live/articles/news/news.html?in_article_id=508609&in_page_id=1770