Breaking news- Olympic stadium- corruption claim?

An archive of news, events and discussion leading up to and post West Ham United's historic move from Upton Park to Stratford in 2016.

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Re: Breaking news- Olympic stadium- corruption claim?

Post by the pink palermo »

Oh dear .

Nobody is likely to come out of this looking very good , but first things first .

Tottenham Hotspur .

They , according to the Sunday Times have hired investigators who have amongst other things obtained bank statements of an employee of West Ham United, and placed his partner under surveillence .

Absolutely scandalous behaviour , and one would hope the most senior person at Spurs who had knowledge of such neferreous activities would resign immediately - or if they cling on , face the full wrath of our clubs legal team to defend our employee .

As for what their investigators did or did not uncover by their obtaining private and confidentail documents , lets wait and see - the fact that Ian Tompkins is a former employee of Newham Council , I would bet Dionne Knight and him have crossed paths in a previous business relationship , and there may be a perfectly innocent and rational explanation .Consultancy contracts abound in such circles .I cannot see Brady getting tied up in anything dodgy .

Spurs alleged behaviour though is scandalous .

I can't see Scotty moving to the Lane now ..........
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Re: Breaking news- Olympic stadium- corruption claim?

Post by west ham15 »

Hope the club do a statement asap to wash away this story
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Re: Breaking news- Olympic stadium- corruption claim?

Post by Dan1326 »

Bribery claim from sky, no shread of evidence, West Ham should sue Sky.
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Re: Breaking news- Olympic stadium- corruption claim?

Post by the pink palermo »

I'm more concerned that it's £20k that could have been spent on a fullback . :lol:
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Re: Breaking news- Olympic stadium- corruption claim?

Post by beckton »

Pinky,

I got the impression from somewhere she was Ian Tompkins girlfriend. I'm not sure where I read it and I may have got that wrong.
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Re: Breaking news- Olympic stadium- corruption claim?

Post by paulhs1 »

Let's just say west ham are completely innocent in all of this, you still have to wonder why we were stupid enough to pay a director of a company affiliated to the bid £20k for consultancy work who just so happens to be the partner of ian tompkins.
And why was the information about payments not made at the time of the bid to show complete transparency?
Either way the whole thing is yet another dogs breakfast!
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Re: Breaking news- Olympic stadium- corruption claim?

Post by Up the Junction »

the pink palermo wrote:They , according to the Sunday Times have hired investigators who have amongst other things obtained bank statements of an employee of West Ham United, and placed his partner under surveillence. Absolutely scandalous behaviour.
Hear hear.
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Re: Breaking news- Olympic stadium- corruption claim?

Post by Dan1326 »

paulhs1 wrote:Let's just say west ham are completely innocent in all of this, you still have to wonder why we were stupid enough to pay a director of a company affiliated to the bid £20k for consultancy work who just so happens to be the partner of ian tompkins.
And why was the information about payments not made at the time of the bid to show complete transparency?
Either way the whole thing is yet another dogs breakfast!
Maybe she was the best candidate for the job and also because she wasn't linked to the bidding process there was no thought that Spurs might try and bull**** an issue.
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Re: Breaking news- Olympic stadium- corruption claim?

Post by beckton »

This all could end up backfiring on Spurs, any chance of scrounging any money off taxpayers could have gone.
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Re: Breaking news- Olympic stadium- corruption claim?

Post by Believer »

the pink palermo wrote:Oh dear .

Nobody is likely to come out of this looking very good , but first things first .

Tottenham Hotspur .

They , according to the Sunday Times have hired investigators who have amongst other things obtained bank statements of an employee of West Ham United, and placed his partner under surveillence .

Absolutely scandalous behaviour , and one would hope the most senior person at Spurs who had knowledge of such neferreous activities would resign immediately - or if they cling on , face the full wrath of our clubs legal team to defend our employee .

As for what their investigators did or did not uncover by their obtaining private and confidentail documents , lets wait and see - the fact that Ian Tompkins is a former employee of Newham Council , I would bet Dionne Knight and him have crossed paths in a previous business relationship , and there may be a perfectly innocent and rational explanation .Consultancy contracts abound in such circles .I cannot see Brady getting tied up in anything dodgy .

Spurs alleged behaviour though is scandalous .

I can't see Scotty moving to the Lane now ..........
Bang on PP !! Regardless of what may or may not have gone on, Tottenham have sunk to new depths even by their standards. To hire a private detective etc is quite frankly pathetic. Levy is a poisonous snake. I don't care if it is for his club - he and evryone else at that club think that they are a law unto themselves and can do what they want when they want and make us out to be the bad guys. It is very shrewd cos a lot of the press still have it in for us after Tevez.
However, in this case, I would like to think that Karren brady will fight fire with fire and go down the route that you are hinting at and highlighting to all and sundry that legal procedures will now take place on behalf of the WHU employee. The scandal at NOTW with phone tapping is big news at the minute and what spurs have done is similar but to be doing this out of sheer greed against a footballing rival is gutter standards.
Hopefully our legal team get all over this cos you can bet that Levy & Hearn will be and have been pushing this to any paper who will listen - hence today's story.

Time for KB to show her metal !!
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Re: Breaking news- Olympic stadium- corruption claim?

Post by Essex 'Ammer12 »

nothing sums up that slimey little club anymore than hiring detectives to go through private and confidential information and 'secret letters' involving the prime minister then ask for a government loan to help them build a new stadium.

utter scumbags.
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Re: Breaking news- Olympic stadium- corruption claim?

Post by paulhs1 »

Dan1326 wrote: Maybe she was the best candidate for the job and also because she wasn't linked to the bidding process there was no thought that Spurs might try and bulls*** an issue.
Although she may not have been involved in the bidding process the question that will now be asked is what information did she supply and could that information have in some way helped our bid!
We should have just steered well clear and if we are innocent we now have huge question marks over our bid that could have been avoided.
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Re: Breaking news- Olympic stadium- corruption claim?

Post by mywhufc »

If spuds have hired a private eye to gather evidence, and they brake the law gathering that evidence is that down to spurs or down to the investigator. If this was a nothing story would it make the front page of the times and not, just suck in the sports pages. Has Ian Tompkins been suspended as the story suggests?
I won't pretend to be disappointed if it helps derail our bid :raver:
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Re: Breaking news- Olympic stadium- corruption claim?

Post by Believer »

mywhufc wrote:
I won't pretend to be disappointed if it helps derail our bid :raver:
Would you honestly enjoy seeing sp*rs in East London with the OS infrastructure and the corporate potential supplementing what is already in place with them ?

Serious question....

The thought of that club with it's slimy chairman and gloating support being in our manor turns my stomach if I'm honest !
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Re: Breaking news- Olympic stadium- corruption claim?

Post by Modern »

Sunday Times

Lovers suspended in stadium scandal

West Ham paid £20,000 to a director of the authority that chose it over Tottenham Hotspur to take over the Games venue after 2012

Michael Gillard, Jonathan Calvert and Claire Newell Published: 3 July 2011

The venue was an upmarket central London hotel and the man sitting opposite the reporters from The Sunday Times was a shadowy corporate intelligence investigator.

He had spent the past four months inquiring into how West Ham United football club had won the lucrative prize of taking over the Olympic stadium after the 2012 Games.

The client paying for his work was Tottenham Hotspur, the Premier League club and losing bidder in the contest for the stadium. Tottenham suspected that confidential information relating to its bid had been leaked.

The investigator explained that he had been researching key employees and board members of the Olympic Park Legacy Company (OPLC), the government body that decided on the future of the stadium.

In the course of this intelligence-gathering he had come across some explosive information. He lent forward across the table and pulled out a photocopy of a NatWest bank statement from a folder.

The statement detailed payments in and out of an account belonging to Dionne Knight, a young executive who has been the director of corporate services at the OPLC since May last year on a salary of £84,000.

Four of the payments on the statement were clearly marked "West Ham United Fo". This was a seemingly damning conflict of interest.

Knight had been paid £566 and £1,302 by the club in the month before the stadium decision and two further sums of £3,400 and £4,646 afterwards. The investigator said there had also been a £4,800 payment in June. "We can't think of a reasonable explanation why one of the bidders should be paying a senior executive from the OPLC," the investigator said.

The investigator also explained that Knight was in a relationship with Ian Tompkins, who happened to be the Olympic project director in charge of securing the stadium for West Ham.

This weekend it has emerged that Knight had been paid a total of £20,400 by West Ham during the crucial bidding period. The payments were arranged by Tompkins and known to his boss, Karren Brady, West Ham's vice-chairman.

Knight and the club say the payments were for "consultancy work" preparing documents for a procurement project on the new stadium.

However, the explanation raises questions as to why West Ham saw no conflict of interest in hiring a senior OPLC executive during the bid.

Both Knight and Tompkins have been suspended pending internal investigations. The fall-out could have serious ramifications for the cash-strapped West Ham, which was relegated from the Premier League in May. The government will also come under pressure from Tottenham to reopen the bidding process, which could cost the taxpayer millions.

In just over a year the eyes of the world will be on the Olympic stadium as it becomes the glittering central stage for the London Games.

The £500m bowl-like structure is built to seat 80,000 people but is considered too large to continue afterwards as an athletics-only venue. The obvious solution was to turn it into a football ground which could also be used for athletics. The OPLC was set up in the summer of 2009 to find new owners for the stadium and other parts of the Olympic park.

West Ham proposed a scheme that reduced the seating capacity to 60,000 but maintained the running track for athletics events. The cost of its redevelopment plan was £95m, to be financed with £35m from the Olympic Delivery Authority, a £40m loan from Newham borough council and the sale of the club's Upton Park ground.

It was a winning formula. On February 11 the OPLC's board voted 14-0 to make West Ham the preferred bidder. Its decision was ratified by the government in March.

Tottenham had come into the bidding process late in the day. The club was anxious to emulate its neighbour, Arsenal, and boost revenues by moving into a new ground with an increased capacity.

It had initially dismissed the Olympic stadium as an option because it did not believe its plans would be acceptable. The club wanted to rebuild the stadium without a running track and develop the athletics facilities elsewhere.

However, at a meeting in City Hall last September, Simon Milton, an adviser to the London mayor, Boris Johnson, encouraged Tottenham to enter the contest. Milton later reassured Tottenham that its plans to make the stadium football-only would not count against it.

The 14-0 defeat on February shocked Tottenham, especially as its plans to rip down the building and not retain the running track were given as reasons for the defeat.

A Tottenham source said the briefing packs that the OPLC had prepared on each bid were "very biased" against the club. It even wondered if its confidential bid document had been leaked to West Ham.

"We were completely stitched up," said the source, who believes that Tottenham was "duped" into entering the contest.

A second highly placed Tottenham source said: "We had been used to leverage a higher or better offer from West Ham. We thought our bid financially would blow them out of the water, bearing in mind [West Ham's] finances."

Tottenham decided to challenge the OPLC and the government through the courts. An initial case seeking judicial review was turned down and an appeal was also refused 10 days ago. The club announced last week that it would now challenge the decision.

However, Tottenham had secretly opened up a second front against West Ham and the OPLC. Two days before the bid decision, it had hired a corporate intelligence company to make discreet inquiries.

The investigators targeted the 14 OPLC board members, who had voted on the bid, looking for conflicts of interests. Businesses and associates were all cross-checked against high-profile members of the West Ham bid, including David Sullivan, the joint owner and chairman, and Brady.

During a trawl of the internet, the investigators came across a well-informed blog by Mike Law, a former Newham councillor who was suspicious of the loan that the Labour-run council had pledged to West Ham. "It was a bizarre partnership between a deprived local authority and a failing football club," he said.

Law gave a witness statement to lawyers acting for Tottenham in which he mentioned the relationship between Knight and Tompkins.

Knight, a 34-year-old single mother, had worked with 53-year-old Tompkins at Newham council. She was director of procurement and Tompkins director of communications. The relationship had begun in May 2008 after Tompkins had separated from his wife and four months before he joined West Ham.

The rumours about the relationship between two key figures in the bidding process were fed to the investigators working for Tottenham.

In early May the investigators put Knight under surveillance at her £350,000 Surrey home, where she lives with her teenage daughter. The investigators obtained access to utility bills, credit reports and also the bank statements of both Knight and Tompkins. Such practices are a breach of data protection law when carried out for commercial reasons. A spokesman for the information commissioner said investigators may have a public interest defence if they are exposing corruption.
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Re: Breaking news- Olympic stadium- corruption claim?

Post by Dan1326 »

If they were lovers, why would West Ham also have to pay for any information? Doesn't make sense as Ian would have got any cruical information other ways which wouldn't be traced.
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Re: Breaking news- Olympic stadium- corruption claim?

Post by beckton »

mywhufc wrote:
I won't pretend to be disappointed if it helps derail our bid :raver:


Oh dear, no wonder your campaign got such a lukewarm response from West Ham supporters.
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Re: Breaking news- Olympic stadium- corruption claim?

Post by Believer »

Dan1326 wrote:If they were lovers, why would West Ham also have to pay for any information? Doesn't make sense as Ian would have got any cruical information other ways which wouldn't be traced.
Thing is though Dan, sp*rs will as the story suggests claim that we got a copy of their bid. Who is to say we didn't ? I think a helluvalot will depend on what her role was in the decision making. For all we know, she could have been Director of Construction or the like - in which case it is a non-story.

As the story also highlights, sp*rs have broken data protection laws with their investigtions and I for one want that person in court charged to that effect - along with their hirer. Regardless of what the info is, sp*rs seem more than happy using illegally retrieved info to their benefit.
Last edited by Believer on Sun Jul 03, 2011 12:58 am, edited 1 time in total.
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Re: Breaking news- Olympic stadium- corruption claim?

Post by Essex 'Ammer12 »

do tottenham hotspur football club not understand that not everything, especially moving into a place like the olympic stadium is not all about money.

sums up that weasley 'football' club
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Re: Breaking news- Olympic stadium- corruption claim?

Post by Believer »

Regardless of all this, I must admit it concerns me that we have been so naive as to get involved in this scandal. It smacks of amateur management of the situation. As I have said, we don't know what her role is / was but surely, there must have been similar skills available in the country if not London.

£20k would seem a tad cheap for such privy info - so I actually think that this is in actual fact fairly innocent. Stupid but innocent.

(although she does drive a Porsche - who bought that ??)
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