Labour Lord Ahmed & Ted Crilley accounting.

I mentioned here about Labour Lord having to quit the City Academies programme after Government investigators found that £60,000 of public money ended up in the coffers of one of his charities and a further £10,000 was blown on a trip to Dubai.

Well its not the first time this ignoble lord has had questions raised over his somewhat loose attitude to public money as the article below from the failing Grauniad shows.

A community organisation which has received millions of pounds in public grants cannot fully explain what use was made of the money, according to a report commissioned by the government.
From 1999-2003 the Council for Ethnic Minority Voluntary Organisations (CEMVO) received £1.2m from the Home Office's Active Communities Unit for promoting inclusion. It has been given £1.7m by the Department of Health, £2.4m by the Millennium Commission and £1m by the Government Office for London.

The group, headed by Lord Bhatia, is at the forefront of the government strategy for engaging with minority communities. It provides grants, training, policy advice and voluntary sector advocacy.

But it is now in talks with the Home Office after a review by the Office for Public Manage ment (OPM) which questioned the group's finances.

The OPM's consultants praised much of its work but said they were unable to match the organisation's activities to the various income streams.

They also said some groups found CEMVO "aloof". There were complaints that its networks in seven regions clashed with groups already formed to help minority communities.

CEMVO faces controversy from a different quarter. The Guardian has learned that after a specific complaint, trustees from its sister group, the Ethnic Minority Foundation, have been summoned by the charity commissioners to explain its grant allocation procedures.

The OPM report lists many of CEMVO's achievements. Its scheme in which black professionals with MBAs assist minority groups was praised, as were its links with many groups across the country.

There is no suggestion of wrongdoing, but the report - leaked to the website Black Information Links - said: "Consultation during the course of this review has revealed concerns on the part of some funders that CEMVO is not demonstrating clearly how funding from different sources is applied to particular activity areas. Our own inquiries to date have not yielded the type and quality of information that we anticipated."

Fifty-eight per cent of the respondents to an OPM questionnaire said the organisation's work was either "excellent/superb/very good" or "good".

CEMVO did not comment in detail on the unpublished report. But a spokeswoman said: "There are clear, factual inaccuracies in the _ reviewers' understanding of how and what the organisation does."

The Home Office declined to comment.

You would think that after the first time they would keep this chap well away from taxpayers money, although maybe they believed his account that it was just "resting in his account"...

Mind this is new Labour and they are well known for helping their noble friends out, sometimes out of prison in just 16 days of so in the case of Labour peer Lord Ahmed.

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