
Flats out: nearly four years after the blocks built on the site of the Lion Green Road car park in Coulsdon were completed, Tory Mayor Perry’s council is nursing a £20m hole in its accounts from a property deal gone badly wrong

It is almost three years since this website warned that a ‘complicated, opaque lease-back arrangement’ conducted with a property firm with no real track record, for the disposal of blocks of flats at Red Clover Gardens, all looked just a bit iffy.
Guess what happened next…?
EXCLUSIVE by STEVEN DOWNES
In the week that the council needed a £119million bail-out to balance its latest budget, Inside Croydon has uncovered a £20million hole in the council’s finances, caused by the collapse of a property deal over one of Brick by Brick’s final developments.
Three years ago, Conservative Mayor Jason Perry pushed through a dodgy-looking sale and lease-back deal for three of the five “architect-designed” blocks of flats at Red Clover Gardens, built on the Lion Green Road car park in Coulsdon.
Taken together, the 157 flats were reckoned to have a market value approaching £50million. Mayor Perry’s crack negotiators at the council only managed to get a sale price of £38million, in a convoluted deal with Regen Capital, a little-known company that some suggested did not have the financial clout to undertake such a deal. Continue reading

Inside Croydon has obtained a top-secret, ‘Part B’ council report providing key financial details on the collapsed property deal for Red Clover Gardens – all because someone at Croydon’s cash-strapped and incompetent council posted it on their own website

Our resident psephologist, WALTER CRONXITE, crunches the numbers after a disastrous by-election result at Gorton and Denton for the Labour Prime Minister, with local elections across London, including in Croydon, just 70 days away

TV and radio politics pundit ANDREW FISHER, right, sat through three hours of false claims and spin at the Town Hall last night, as Croydon’s £87,000 per year lame duck Mayor still says he has done a decent job

EXCLUSIVE: It’s trebles all-round for directors at Croydon’s cash-strapped council, as there’s a second generous pay rise in 12 months for council chiefs, while allowances paid to councillors are also to rise, and amount to £1.6m per year.





Jason Perry, Croydon’s Conservative Mayor, has got his begging bowl out again to government, this time for an extra £119million for the next financial year, just to make his latest busted budget balance.




CROYDON CHRONICLES: A prize-winner at Croydon School of Art went on to become one of the most sought-after portrait artists in Edwardian London, and taught Evelyn Waugh and the Wizard of Oz’s Scarecrow.


It’s Victorian London, 1869. At the Angel Amphitheatre, four women are preparing for the battle of their lives.
