still need answers – where is the money?
Mr O’Loughlin’s company was given £346,000 to run a London business website, even though it was based in Liverpool. We learned that Mr O’Loughlin put Diversity International into liquidation without accounting for the taxpayers’ money. The liquidator, we found, was preparing legal action against him for “trading offences”. We found a project called Brixton Base, whose patron was Mr Jasper and whose director was a close friend of his, Errol Walters. Brixton Base got £287,000 from Mr Livingstone’s London Development Agency for “premises”, even though it occupied an LDA-owned building and was charged no rent at the time. It got a further £230,000 to run training courses over a two-year period, but only ever delivered three courses, lasting a matter of weeks. The leader of one of those courses, Shango B’Song, told us that he paid for it out of his own pocket and never saw more than a fraction of the City Hall grant supposedly given to fund it. When he complained to a member of Brixton Base
