Edinburgh Sucks! | Dirty tricks by Rosendale’s fraudsters

Alistar Frater

Dirty tricks by Rosendale’s fraudsters

By The Basa ⋅ March 7, 2006 ⋅

EdinburghSucks email box was really busy today with our freinds from the Children & Families department of the good City Council. What has been irking them is that they were all send an email through the myEdinburgh website seemingly currently owned by Mercurytide although council workers are still using it and trying to sell it to community organisations throughout the city.

It seems that a Ronald Deekie at the end of last week decided to send a strange email to the whole department. This can, if the Head of Children & Families wishes it to be, be tracked down. The contents of the email are as follows:

Mr J Travers -v- The City of Edinburgh Council.

Please find attached the Employment Tribunal judgement re John (Jinty) Travers vs City of Edinburgh Council. To save you time, however, here are some of the findings:

The evidence

89. The claimant’s (Mr Travers) evidence was neither reliable nor credible.

108. The claimant cannot be said to have been acting in “good faith” given the personal antagonism revealed towards Mike Rosendale and David Hillson in the four e-mails in question.

111. Finally, in the whole issue of “good faith” the claimant’s actions in vehemently denying his involvement in the sending of the e-mails for a period of one year should be considered as a relevant factor. The claimant was unable to provide any coherent explanation for this under cross-examination or questioning from the Members.

124. The claimant admitted that his e-mail of 26th November 2002 could have resulted in disciplinary action. It is impossible to separate the “angst” that might have been caused from that disciplinary action alone from any “angst” that was in fact caused.

130. Turning to the issue of “belief” this appears to be partly objective and partly subjective. We are bound to say that on the claimant’s own evidence, this was the matter which gave us more difficulty in this case. At times the claimant’s evidence was vague as to what information had made him reach the conclusion that there was “wrongdoing” within the City connect project and precisely how he had come by it. At other times, it appeared to us that he was exaggerating or embellishing his evidence as to what he had heard, knew or believed at the relevant time (in 2002) to try and make it appear more convincing.

131. We emphasise that we are making no judgment as to whether there was anything untoward in relation to these matters or any of the claimant’s other suspicions.

132. We also think it important to record our impression that in the period before the sending of the emails, the claimant appears to have developed in more general terms a jaundiced view of the ELLF/City Connect Project and its failure to deliver what he thought were the priorities. Thus, it appears to us that the claimant may have, to some extent, over interpreted events and information – or added two and two and come up with five, to put it more colloquially.

What the author forgot to put into the email was that the contents of the evil email was not what the findings of the tribunal were, they were in fact snippets from the Council’s defence, which failed and the Council was fined a whopping £5,000 for failing to protect the whistleblower who watched ‘Rosendale’s Fraudsters’ rip of the city to the tune of almost £400,000.

We have been informed by quite a few of our correspondents that this attempt to smear John Travers was in retaliation to our articles on Edinburgh Sucks.

This is a continuing and hot story and we shall be adding more info hopefully throughout the day after meeting with a couple of people who are interested in the case and have various pieces of documentation. It seems that board members of ELLP from agencies outwith Children & Families are now desperate not to be associated with the fraud.

More info coming…