Right-wing councillor-run BICo took cash with no receipts for years and doled out cash that benefited councillors, their families and friends

Liverpool council is finally to release a report on its internal audit investigation into the activities of the Beautiful Ideas Company (BICo), four years after it was conducted – and only after the Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO) upheld a complaint by a local about the council’s failure to disclose its findings. The mayor has promised to address ‘wrongdoing’, but not specifically to publicly identify, let alone criminally pursue, any wrongdoers, instead choosing to push the idea that the issues are historic and not directly relevant to today’s regime.

But large parts of the concerns about BICo – run by right-wing Labour councillors to collect unreceipted cash from match-day car parks close to the city’s two Premier League football grounds, supposedly to be invested back into the community – were already made public after Skwawkbox revealed a Labour report by Cllr Barry Kushner. Kushner’s report found that:

• the car parks had been run with no documentation of the amount of cash taken
• BICo had doled out more than £160,000 to organisations with close links to the company’s directors and £190,000 to companies that were either not trading or barely staying afloat
• sums included £20,000 to an organisation to provide a job for the daughter of one of the councillors
• most of the recipients of the cash were not involved in activities with a social impact
• the number of cars reported as parking in the car parks was significantly lower than the figure believed to be real

And more. For full details and analysis of BICo’s activities, read here and be informed of what was going on before the ‘new’ report is finally by a ‘Labour’ council that was withholding it.

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This content was originally published here.