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Council yet to start legal action on Negrini’s £437,000 pay-off

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CROYDON IN CRISIS: Mayor Perry is taking his time over his public claim to be pursuing the former council CEO for a refund of her golden handshake. EXCLUSIVE by STEVEN DOWNES

A handful: former Croydon CEO Jo Negrini still has her mitts on that £437,000 pay-off

Almost two months after Jason Perry, Croydon’s elected Mayor, announced that the council could potentially be going to court to recover part or all of the £437,000 “golden handshake” given to departing chief executive Jo Negrini in August 2020, and no legal proceedings have been actioned.

That’s according to “Negreedy” Negrini herself, or at least the latest firm of solicitors the self-proclaimed “regeneration practitioner” has hired to defend her… [checks notes]… reputation.

And it would appear that Negreedy’s lawyers are well-briefed about the legal position of their client, and the council’s very weak grounds in any attempt to claw back some of the money she received, paid as a settlement package ahead of her somewhat rushed departure before the financial solid matter really hit the fan.

Negrini’s lawyers could probably have worked it out for themselves, but they have also been assisted by Croydon Council itself, when it published confidential legal advice on its own website which described the exercise of going after the Negrini pay-off as “throwing good money after bad”.

Slow motion: Tory Mayor Jason Perry

Mayor Perry knows all this, of course. Or at least he should do.

It was the then mere Councillor Perry, as the Conservative-controlled council’s cabinet member for planning and development, who in 2013 rubber-stamped the recruitment of Negrini as exec director. She was the council’s fifth planning chief in the space of little more than two years, as no one else seemed to match the demands of Westfield, whose interest in central Croydon had only just been revealed.

In June 2016, little more than two years after she arrived at Fisher’s Folly, Negrini was promoted to the local authority’s top job, on a salary of £194,500. At the time, Tony Newman, by then the leader of the Labour-run council, said, “The decision to offer Jo the job was made unanimously…”, which sort of suggests that Jason Cummings and Tim Pollard, Perry’s Tory colleagues on the appointments committee, voted in favour of that move.

Unanimous appointment: Negrini’s promotion to CEO in 2016 was backed by the Tories who had recruited her to Croydon Council in 2013

Unfortunately (or conveniently, depending on your perspective on the transparency of council business), there is no record of the vote in the council’s official committee minutes.

There has been a persistent rumour ever since that the recruitment consultants who were hired by the council, no doubt at considerable cost to the public purse, actually advised that committee not to hand the CEO position to Negrini. And that they were ignored. No one has been prepared to confirm, nor deny, that bit of council scuttlebuck.

By the time the appointments committee was meeting in late August 2020, Perry was back among the attendees for the Tories.

This was the meeting that discussed the “complete breakdown” in the working relationship between Negrini and council leader Newman (a bit of a problem for a local authority in the middle of the twin crises of the covid lockdown and their financial free-fall). The only way out was to show Negrini the exit door, and buy her silence with a massive wodge of (public) cash.

Majority decision: Perry and his Tory colleague did at least vote against the £437,000 pay-off to the exiting chief executive, Jo Negrini

Inside Croydon understands that, on this occasion at least, Perry and his party colleague, Pollard, did vote against the pay-off, but were out-voted by Newman, Alison Butler, Simon Hall and Alisa Flemming. And on this occasion the minutes confirm that, as they record that the decision was reached by a majority. It’s one of the few bits of information from that meeting that has ever been made public.

So while the massive and entirely undeserved pay-out to Negrini, by a council that she had led to the brink of bankruptcy, has understandably been the cause of considerable public anger, it has long been suggested that the real fault in this sorry saga lies not with the recipient of the settlement, but with those who decided to authorise it.

Why this has now become a matter for Negrini’s lawyers is an article in the i newspaper published last week under the headline “Local councils have been driven to the brink by austerity and incompetence – now taxpayers are suffering”. Hardly in the Gotcha! class of headline writing, but it gives you the gist.

The article quoted Perry, who as usual sought to blame others for his own ineffectiveness, and included much with which iC’s loyal reader should already be familiar.

Rising to the bait: the i newspaper got nothing wrong in its report, but still attracted a solicitors’ letter on behalf of Jo Negrini

The article also originally included this paragraph about Croydon: “In March the council  agreed to refer reports into the conduct of previous senior leaders to the Metropolitan Police and relevant professional bodies, while also taking legal action against its former chief executive Jo Negrini to recover a £437,000 settlement she received on leaving in 2020.”

Which is all true and based on established facts.

But soon after, the newspaper received a snotty missive from solicitors acting on behalf of Negrini. They had written with what those in the libel business regard as a pre-emptive strike. There was no actual threat of action, just an attempt to deliver a correction where no correction was necessary.

Withers LLP claimed the article “contains inaccuracies”. It doesn’t, and it appears to have remain published, despite the less-than-withering rebuke.

But the solicitors’ note to the i did provide some interesting updates from Negrini.

They said, “There is no legal action currently against Ms Negrini and the council has not yet commenced any pre-action stages.”

It is almost seven weeks since Mayor Perry announced to the people of Croydon, “It is completely unacceptable that individuals… [should] be rewarded for their failures while our residents, businesses and partners continue to pay the price.

“They must be held to account.”

Since when, nuffink. Nada. Zilch. And this after Mayor Perry and his predecessors had allowed council officials to suppress the Penn Report, which recommended considering this and other actions, for more than two years.

A true man of action is part-time Perry, clearly.

Long wait: the council announced its action against Negrini, and others, nearly two months ago

Withers also showed that they had read the legal advice provided to Croydon Council by Jane Mulcahy KC in April 2022, when she told them that pursuing Negreedy for her pay-off would be “throwing good money after bad”.

Mulcahy highlighted how only a fraction of the £437,000 golden handshake could ever be recovered.

Mulcahy pointed out that the bulk of the payment to Negrini – £284,000 to her pension fund – was effectively 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 [Jo Negrini’s] settlement package… Further, even if the council is successful, it is most unlikely to be awarded all its costs,” the KC wrote in April 2022.

In their warning letter to the i newspaper last week, Withers did the maths: “The council would not be able to ‘recover a £437,000 settlement’; the maximum sum they could attempt to recover is £96,000.”

Which raises the matter of when Mayor Perry will stop pretending he is going after any of those implicated in the council’s financial collapse and actually admit that he has broken yet another of his election promises.

Read more: ‘You seem to be trying to put the genie back in the bottle’
Read more: ‘Better than evens’ chance of winning Negrini legal case
Read more: #PennReport: No referrals sent to staff’s professional bodies
Read more: #PennReport wanted police probe into possible misconduct


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