English mayor charged with corruption; Defenders claim “Islamophobia”

The British government in February called in chartered accountants, including Sir John Jenkins, Author of the Year 2014 Muslim Brotherhood Reviewa study of the British activities of the transnational Islamist movement to examine Lutfur Rahman's use of public funds. Rahman is the current Mayor of Tower Hamlets, having previously held the post repressed for fraud and then re-elected. He is linked to the Islamic Forum of Europe, a front of the South Asian revolutionary Islamist group Jamaat e Islami.

Communities Minister Simon Hoare told Parliament said on February 22 that inspectors had been appointed to investigate Tower Hamlets Council, which had experienced “significant turnover at senior management levels, resulting in a number of interim appointments at the council's senior management level.” .

The emergency review of the council, which oversees a £1.2bn annual budget, comes ten years after a previous best value inspection in 2014 by Price Waterhouse Coopers. published found in November 2014 evidence of serious irregularities and a lack of transparency in the allocation of public subsidies, the disposal of public buildings and advertising expenditure. (“Best Value” inspections are necessary British law aims to ensure that government agencies carry out their duties “with a combination of economy, efficiency and effectiveness.”)

Following the government's announcement of the new inspection, the political blog Harry's Place published reported that “community elders” had sent a letter to Michael Gove, Secretary of State for Housing and Communities, on March 18, naming Sir John Jenkins, a former ambassador to Saudi Arabia and other Middle Eastern countries and a senior fellow at the right-wing think tank Policy Exchange of Bias. The letter, distributed by Islamist-friendly media Eye of the Middle East And The socialist worker, questioned “why a former Middle East diplomat would be specifically appointed as an inspector of this district” and called for his removal from the team auditing Tower Hamlets. The team is led by Kim Bromley-Derry, the former chief executive of the neighboring East London Borough of Newham, which hosted the 2012 London Olympics.

The letter refers to “worrying posts” on Sir John’s social media that indicate “his current focus appears to be on Islam, political Islam, particularly Muslim countries and Muslim politicians in the UK and beyond.” All this shows that this is the prism through which he operates and through which he will carry out the inspection in the council.”

“Sir Jenkins' online presence clearly shows that he supports posts that are Islamophobic, defend Islamophobia or engage in propaganda against Muslims (including London Mayor Sadiq Khan) and Muslim-majority countries,” the letter said. The authors criticize this elsewhere

At no point do the authors address the investigation into Lutfur Rahman, who served as mayor of Tower Hamlets from 2010 to 2015. Rahman's term ended when Electoral Court Judge Richard Mawrey banned Rahman and his deputy Alibor Choudhury from holding public office for five years later find Both are guilty of crimes such as fraud, abuse of office and conspiracy to defraud the returning officer. The violations included mail-in voting fraud and “undue spiritual influence” on Muslims to re-elect the mayor as a religious duty.

In his 2015 Verdict, Judge Mawrey found that community grants were awarded to boost Rahman's personal popularity to ineligible organizations, some of which had not even applied for public money. He recognized a clear redirection of funding away from secular institutions that served the entire community, towards denominational or religious groups that only served Muslim sections of the community, which then made up just 34.5 percent of Tower Hamlets' population, by providing grants for charitable organizations such as B. were shortened as Alzheimer's Society.

The Sunday Telegraph reported In 2010, seven serving and former Tower Hamlets councilors had stated that Rahman, a former Labor mayoral candidate, was elected to the leadership of Tower Hamlets with the support of the Islamic Forum of Europe (IFE), based at the East London Mosque. According to a report In the Daily Telegraph, the IFE is “dedicated, in its own words, to changing the infrastructure of society, its institutions, its culture, its political order and its faith… from ignorance to Islam.” A joint investigation by the Sunday Telegraph and Channel 4 Dispatches found that after Mr Rahman took over as chairman, more council grants were paid to a number of organizations closely linked to the IFE.

In 2010, Jim Fitzpatrick, former workplace environment minister and MP for Tower Hamlets in Poplar and Canning Town, told The Sunday Telegraph that the Islamic Forum of Europe “acted almost like an entry organization, integrating people into political parties and members “political parties that seek to select and elect individuals so that they can exercise political influence and power, whether at the local or national level.”

“They are completely at odds with the Labor program and our support for secularism,” Fitzpatrick said.

After his party Tower Hamlets First was banned by the electoral court in 2015, Bangladesh-born Rahman founded the independent Aspire party in 2018 and was re-elected in May 2022 alongside 24 Aspire councilors tactics identified by Mawrey, according to Conservative peer Lord Hayward, who called on the Electoral Commission to be more vigilant in October 2021.