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Taxing times for Perry as he deploys Negrini as his ‘dead cat’

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Try not to get your hopes up too much ahead of next week’s Penn Report meeting, suggests STEVEN DOWNES. The Mayor might be over-promising before under-delivering again

‘Jeez! Did someone say “dead cat”?’: Jo Negrini appearing as a regeneration expert (seriously) on behalf of Arup last month

Is Jo Negrini being used as a “dead cat” by Croydon Mayor Jason Perry?

It is Aussie political spin doctor Lynton Crosby who is attributed with coming up with the ploy. The man behind the classy Tory slogan “It’s Not Racist to Impose Limits on Immigration” and who steered the Tories to their General Election win in 2015, Crosby was for many years Boris Johnson’s favourite campaign guru, helping him win two elections for London Mayor (and in one instance pocketing £140,000 for four months’ work…).

It was Johnson who offered up this explanation of Crosby’s deadcattery: “There is one thing that is absolutely certain about throwing a dead cat on the dining room table – and I don’t mean that people will be outraged, alarmed, disgusted. That is true, but irrelevant.

“The key point, says my Australian friend, is that everyone will shout, ‘Jeez, mate, there’s a dead cat on the table!’

“In other words, they will be talking about the dead cat – the thing you want them to talk about – and they will not be talking about the issue that has been causing you so much grief.”

For Jason Perry, a 15per cent Council Tax hike, to be imposed on the borough at his own request, is causing him a great deal of grief.

More than 30,000 signatures have been collected in two petitions opposing Perry’s premium Council Tax increase. On one of those petitions, to Parliament, there are twice as many signatures from the Tory heartlands of the Croydon South constituency as there have been so far from Labour-voting Croydon North.

The Conservative supporters and members of residents associations who helped bring in the mayoral system in Croydon and then elected Perry as the borough’s first executive Mayor are going to be as hard-hit by the 15per cent Council Tax hike as anyone else. And they are clearly not very happy about that.

Anyone lost a cat?: Mayor Jason Perry

Which is where Jo “Negreedy” Negrini comes in.

The former council chief executive remains a much-loathed figure among Croydon voters even now, two-and-a-half years after she walked out of the plate glass doors of Fisher’s Folly for a final time, with a cheque for £437,000 of Council Tax-payers’ money tucked into her designer briefcase.

After failing to deliver on the town centre’s growth zone, after overseeing the concreting over of swathes of suburban neighbourhoods, without progressing Westfield but delivering Brick by Brick and the Fairfield Halls fiasco, it is reasonable to suggest that Negrini is liable to be remembered, less-than-fondly, for some time to come.

A good part of the reason Croydon Council is in the billion-pound mess that it finds itself today, with more than 400 jobs cut from council staff since 2020, is because of what happened when Negrini was in charge.

And so: THWACK! Mayor Perry last night threw Negrini, or at least the notion of her, onto Croydon’s dining room table.

After taking a verbal battering for two weeks over Council Tax, Perry decided he would seek to change the subject…

The Penn Report: Inside Croydon has published parts of it. Jason Perry and Croydon Council have so far failed to do so

Perry decided to talk about the The Penn Report.

Remember that? The 160-page document following an investigation into possible wrong-doing that led to the council’s financial collapse, and which Katherine Kerswell, Negrini’s replacement as council CEO, has been withholding for more than two years?

The same Penn Report that Perry pledged, when seeking election as Mayor, to make public with all due haste, but which the council has still yet to release?

Yeah, that Penn Report, the one which Inside Croydon has published extensive extracts from over the past six months or so.

Perry, for reasons best known to himself and his close advisers (some of whom have worked in Downing Street and at Conservative Central Office, and would be well aware of the dark arts and deadcattery of Lynton Crosby) decided to bring up the matter of Penn.

“Next week the council’s appointments committee will formally consider whether to publish the Penn Report into the council’s historic mismanagement,” the Mayor said.

Grandstanding: Perry’s announcement last night. Don’t get your hopes up…

“Whilst I will respect due process, I remain convinced that it is strongly in the public interest for the report to be published,” said the man who has still failed to order the council chief executive to undertake that simple process.

Perry, somewhat apologetically it might seem, recited what would be on the agenda of a committee which he chairs, saying, “It’s taken longer than I’d wanted, but… I am committed to ensuring those responsible for Croydon’s financial collapse are held to account.” Which is nice.

And he threw in this juicy morsel for those preparing to march on the Town Hall on March 1 over Perry’s premium Council Tax hike. The appointments and disciplinary committee (our itals), to give it its full title (why might the Mayor omit that in his public statement?), is to consider, as Perry puts it, “Whether legal action can be taken to recover the monies paid to the former chief executive…”, meaning Negreedy, “under her settlement agreement.”

At risk of mixing our animal metaphors, however, that horse has bolted long ago. As Perry well knows.

It was Mayor Perry who supported an unsuccessful High Court legal action against this website last November after we obtained copies of the legal advice given to the council in April 2022 over the matter of Negrini’s golden handshake.

The council had published the legal advice on their own website, and were sorely embarrassed when Inside Croydon discovered it (thanks to a sharp-witted loyal reader) and reproduced it. Perry’s ill-considered injunction against Inside Croydon (estimated legal costs for the cash-strapped council: £20,000) flopped.

Which is why today, we can re-published extracts from the advice given to Croydon by Jane Mulcahy KC.

Useful advice: part of Jane Mulcahy KC’s 14-page legal guidance to Croydon Council last year

Mulcahy’s 14-page appraisal of the legal position over the pay-off to Negrini considered whether the council’s former CEO had acted in breach of contract and, if so, what the prospects might be of recovering any of her pay-out.

Mulcahy gave the council a “better than evens” chance of success in the courts, but also went on to suggest that it would be but a Pyrrhic victory, since only a fraction of the £437,000 golden handshake given to Negrini could ever be recovered.

For a start, of the Negrini pay-off, £284,000 to her pension fund is untouchable.

“My concern is that the council will be throwing good money after bad, since any victory in money terms will be for only a fraction of the full value of JN’s settlement package… Further, even if the council is successful, it is most unlikely to be awarded all its costs,” Mulcahy wrote.

“Should the council proceed with action for breach of the agreement it is likely that protracted legal action will follow as it is most unlikely that JN will accept any wrongdoing.

“Allegations which JN may potentially make in her defence (eg that members well knew/condoned what was happening), as well as generally airing all the issues around the Fairfield Halls refurbishment in a public forum, may well be reputationally damaging to the council as a whole.”

Mayor Perry knows this. Negrini and her own lawyers know this, too.

Indeed, Negrini already knows exactly what action Croydon Council is considering taking against her arising from the Penn Report, because the council has already told her.

Negrini has been indulged as many as three times through the legally constipated council’s use of a Maxwellisation process: going to those at the centre of an investigation, and oh-so-politely consulting them on whether they have any objections.

Congratulations: Negrini’s LinkedIn page, keeping her in touch with former colleagues Colm Lacey and Richard Simpson

So unless Perry and Kerswell are finally going to go for the nuclear option and seek criminal charges of misconduct in public office or some such against Negrini, they would be proceeding against their own legal advice if they were to try to recover the pay-off money from her (the council has also received legal advice about misconduct criminal action, too, and apparently it is not something the Director of Public Prosecutions is all that keen on…).

There are other signs, too, that Negrini knows she’s not going to face any lengthy legal battle with her former employers.

Last month, we reported how she’d applied to de-register her consultancy company, Total Shit Ltd (or something like that). The company appeared to have only one client, Arup, the engineering consultants who had enjoyed some generous council contracts in Croydon in the days when Negrini was in charge. Now, out on her own as an independent consultant, business was hardly booming for Negrini.

But it appears that there is another reason Negrini is folding her own business: Arup have given her a job.

Last month, she appeared on stage as an Arup “expert” at a British property conference. And earlier this week, she posted on her social media a plaintive message: “Congratulate Jo for being promoted to Director at Arup.”

The appointment, it seems is something to do with “Inclusion and Equity” and “Cities and Regeneration”. Which is nice.

Among Negrini’s first old pals to provide her with the comfort blanket of the requested congratulations were none other than Colm Lacey, her old buddy from Lambeth and Newham councils who she installed as a six-figure salaried managing director of Brick by Brick, with disastrous consequences, and Richard Simpson, the former Croydon finance director who set-up Brick by Brick and also oversaw the dodgy “licence” arrangement that put the rookie house-builders in charge of the Fairfield Halls refurbishment.

Now, it is entirely possible that Negrini has never mentioned to her new bosses at Arup the possibility that she just might be tied up in a forthcoming two-year-plus court battle over her performance for her previous employers.

But otherwise, would a multi-national firm such as Arup, highly risk-averse and always mindful of the potential for “reputational damage”, really take on Negrini in a senior role if they thought that there is truly any prospect of Croydon Council’s lawyers coming calling any time soon?

Probably not. And Mayor Jason Perry really ought to know that, too.

Read more: ‘You seem to be trying to put the genie back in the bottle’
Read more: Newman and the Negrini pay-off: no papers, no notes, no reasons
Read more: #PennReport wanted police probe into possible misconduct
Read more: #PennReport: Cover-ups and denial over Brick by Brick failure


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