18 January - Crooked accounting
A small number of this month’s readers’ questions and tip offs have not reached these pages and maybe I should say why as I do not wish to discourage them - although this one might be an exception.
Hi, Do you order items from Amazon?
Err… Not any more. They increased their Prime membership price by 33% so I cancelled
it. After buying well over 200 items from Amazon last year there have been no
orders from me in 2024. Not one, and yesterday computer components priced at
£770·95 which could have come from Amazon did not. Such huge price increases should not be tolerated
from anyone. Sainsbury’s tins of rice pudding suddenly becoming only half full
of rice is fortunately for them far too off topic to be mentioned.
So back to Bexley.
L&Q, the housing association suspected of
flogging off social housing across the
borough is said to have been forced to raise a £245 million loan from Barclays
using tenants’ houses as security. Anonymous messages have a track record of
being 100% true but this rather peculiar transaction has eluded all efforts to
find it on line. So believe it if you like…
A reference to
an eight year old web page featuring the words of two senior Bexley Council
officers whose salaries we fortunately no longer have to pay is just a bit too long in
the tooth even for BiB. In summary the Director of HR was boasting of how he was
curtailing the use of Agency staff in Bexley and thereby keeping costs low. Now
he is on LinkedIn looking for a new position backed by a reference from his former
subordinate. Cutting Agency staff worked out well didn’t it? Bexley limps along
on the backs of expensive Agency staff.
The temporary Chief Executive has had a chequered history being associated with
far too many financial failures; in Barnet, Newham and OneSource all of which have
been documented here. One of Bexley’s many mischief makers sent me a seven
year old document which says that the Acting CEO, along with three colleagues, reviewed the
financial arrangements at Thurrock Council. They made eight recommendations - and
now Thurrock is effectively bankrupt.
It has to be said that Bexley’s man dissociated himself
from all his former
employers rather a long time ago which might make him a skilled strategist or just
plain lucky. In Bexley he has, if I might judge from a very few Councillors’
comments, been a little divisive which is not always a bad thing and so far
Bexley has not gone broke despite the best efforts of our Conservative government.
Beating the two seven plus year old reports by a considerable margin was one
that implied that Bexley Council is full of fraudsters but my interest waned
somewhat when it led me to
an old News Shopper page from when the NS was a newspaper. That’s 2007! It revealed how a
Bexley Council accountant nicked a quarter of a million under the nose of the
Director of Finance. I had better not mention how
much the same happened to our
new CEO when he was the finance boss in Barnet. Now the External Auditors won’t
authorise the publication of Bexley’s accounts.
Something odd must be going on in Bexley. It most certainly is in Thurrock right now where
their Accountant is under investigation.