Your coverage of the E11 Business Improvement District (BID) Com-pany’s collapse (‘Row erupts over debt of improvement firm’, Guardian, November 7) begs many questions.

As a one-time E11 BID. director, Cllr Loakes will no doubt wish to clarify his own role in the crisis, particularly since, according to your report, his term of office (November 2010 to August 2011) coincided with the period when the company’s wheels first came off.

The council, too, has some explaining to do.

Why did it keep feeding money to an entity that owed large sums to HMRC? Why can it not produce the contract documents that underpinned some of its largesse? Why did it pay over £50,000 in 2011 for the upkeep of the One Stop Shop in Leytonstone High Road when the legal owner of that facility – the E11 BID’s operating arm, the Leytonstone Business Forum CIC – was in the process of being struck off?

Why did it allow the E11 BID the lucrative opportunity to deliver Worknet, despite the fact that the latter had no relevant experience or skill?

And finally, why did the council route large-scale cash payments to the E11 BID through the mysterious Waltham Forest Business CIC rather than transfer them directly – was this something to do with VAT or was it aimed at keeping these transactions outside the scrutiny of the Freedom of Information Act?

Given that it’s the poor old residents who have financed this fiasco, some answers are well overdue.

Nick Tiratsoo, Odessa Road, Leytonstone.