Further to your story about the E11 BID Co. fiasco (‘Public and press thrown out of E11 BID meeting’, Guardian, April 10), it appears that the council is so muddled about the whole issue that it can no longer distinguish what is true and what is not.
To take one example, I have been particularly concerned to discover whether, when the council gave the E11 BID Co. hundreds of thousands of pounds of public money, it then checked to see that these sums were spent correctly.
In correspondence during January 2014, Ms Shifa Mustafa (Deputy Chief Executive) told me: ‘All payments were monitored to ensure that the services agreed to were delivered’ – a straightforward comment with no ifs and buts.
Yet when in February I then used the Freedom of Information Act to ask the council for the evidence that substantiated Ms. Mustafa’s assertion, I was told that ‘the council does not hold the information requested in recorded form’. Perhaps the paper trail had been mistakenly shredded between January and February. Perhaps Ms. Mustafa ‘mis-remembered’. Who knows. But we certainly won’t get the bottom of what happened unless the Council comes clean about these important details.
Nick Tiratsoo, Odessa Road, E7
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