For seven years, a fraud investigation hung over Medway Commercial Group, the council-run company responsible for services local residents rely on every day, from CCTV to other frontline delivery work. Now the people of Medway are watching their elected councillors demand answers about why it all ended without charge.
Medway councillors voted unanimously at a full council meeting on Thursday to ask the Independent Office for Police Conduct to intervene in the handling of the case, which Kent Police shelved after seven years. The force said the case did not meet the evidential standards needed to proceed, according to the Local Democracy Reporting Service.
The concerns that started it all came from one person: a whistleblower. In October 2018, that individual made contact with the authority’s chief legal officer to raise worries that some officers were potentially using the company, which had acted as the council’s trading arm since December 2015, for personal gain.
Papers published ahead of the meeting named senior staff and MCG board members: chairman Andrew Mackness, chief executive Ian Price and Vikram Sahdev. The men were questioned by fraud officers. Yet there was no formal finding that they had done anything wrong, and none of them have been charged over the matter. In a statement last week, Mackness denied any wrongdoing whatsoever, while Sahdev declined to comment. Attempts to approach Price have so far been unsuccessful.
Council leader Vince Maple told colleagues the vote was not a step any authority wished to take. “On an operational level, Medway Council and Kent Police have a good working relationship,” he said, “but on this case, in this investigation, Kent Police have badly let down the taxpayers of Medway.”
That phrase, taxpayers of Medway, sits at the heart of why councillors felt compelled to act. The letter the council will send to the IOPC complains that the investigation was “poorly resourced, ineffectively conducted and managed, and lacked the characteristics of a thorough, effective and/or efficient process”. For residents, the question is straightforward: seven years of police work into alleged financial wrongdoing at a company they ultimately underwrote, and no resolution they can trust.
The route the complaint will take is itself unusual. Typically, a request for the IOPC to investigate would be sent to the Police and Crime Commissioner, Matthew Scott. Mackness, however, previously acted as Scott’s election agent, so to avoid any possible conflict of interest, the matter is being referred directly to the watchdog instead. There is no suggestion Scott has done anything wrong.
The full picture of the case, and the council’s response to it, was reported by the BBC, whose coverage can be found at https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cqm24melr4zxo.
For now, the people named in the published papers remain under no formal finding of wrongdoing, and the whistleblower’s original concerns have never been tested in court. What Medway’s councillors have done is push for an independent examination of how the investigation was run, arguing that the community deserves to know whether the process itself failed, whatever the eventual answer about the allegations may be.
The IOPC’s response to the council’s letter will determine whether that examination happens. Until then, residents are left with an unresolved case, a unanimous vote from their representatives, and a leader willing to say publicly that a police force he otherwise works closely with let his constituents down.