1st September 2016
STOP PRESS: Important update here identifies the person Crabtree allegedly targeted.
The former chair of Wirral Council’s influential Audit and Risk Management Committee appeared in Wirral Magistrates Court today to answer a charge of…
“sending a grossly offensive or indecent message on a public communications network”.
Crabtree is no stranger to controversy, having once been in trouble for encouraging special educational needs schoolchildren to deliver his Labour Party leaflets when he was a councillor:
June 2015 article, courtesy Wirral Leaks
When we emailed him and his 65 colleagues for their thoughts on a proposition we’d been formulating, he described the prospect of Wirral councillors notifying with the Information Commissioner (in order to protect the public’s privacy rights) as follows:
However Council Leader and inveterate, unashamed liar (see here, here, here, here, here, and here) Phil Davies, noticing the potential for heavy fines, was on hand to quickly bail out all 66 councillors, none of whom had bothered to notify as data controllers, including Crabtree. The leader fired off a cheque for 66 x £35 (£2,310) and has been doing this every year since.
So, perhaps we’re not dealing with the sharpest tool in the box. But for some reason, he’s been living a very charmed life when you consider he never faced any noticeable action for exploiting the Meadowside children and was later promoted to a high profile post – Chair of the Audit and Risk Management Committee.
At one point on 8th October 2014, he chaired one of the most important meetings this committee had seen. Whistleblowers Nigel Hobro and James Griffiths brought before it serious, detailed and well-researched allegations of fraud on the part of council partner organisations, involving sums upwards of £2 million, only for Crabtree in concert with the then CEO Graham Burgess to scandalously fob them off.
Crabtree is no longer a councillor.
From the sketchy detail provided in the Wirral Globe article above, we’ve assumed that the charge Crabtree denied today is likely to be related to the following:
Wirral In It Together 
Pingback: UPDATE ~ Former Wirral Councillor Jim Crabtree – up in court today | Wirral In It Together
pAUL..SPOT ON ABOUT mR cRABTREES ATTEMPT IN jULY 2014 ABSOLUTELY TO FINISH OFF THE WIRRALBIZ SCANDAL ON A QUICK lABOUR MAJORITY VOTE REGARDLESS OF THE NUMEROUS PUBLIC ATTENDEES. iT ALL WENT WRONG WHEN THE cONSERVATIVE COUNCILLORS OBJECTED VEHEMENTLY TO BE PRESS GANGED INTO FINALISING THE MATTER. THEY HAD ONE WEEK TO DIGEST SOME 700 PAGES OF ENQUIRY.
A DISGRACEFUL ATTEMPT TO GERRYMANDER AND IN OPEN CONTEMPT OF THE PUBLIC WHO HAD GATHERED IN GREAT NUMBER. WHEN AFTER SOME HALF AN HOUR THE MEETING BROKE UP IN FURORE NO APOLOGY CAME THERE FROM THE CHAIRMAN, MR CRABTREE, FOR WASTING THE PUBLIC’S TIME.
IT SEEMED THE PROSPECT OF A MEETING OF THE AUDIT AD RISK COMMITTEE NOT AS SOPORIFIC AS WAS THE NORM SOMEHOW FRIGHTENED AND ALARMED THE CHAIR
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