Does this fit in this community? It is on the edge, but since the Guardian considers it to fall under ‘environment’, I’ll go with that:
The water regulator for England and Wales has been accused of a cover-up after failing to declare dinners its chairman had with water company executives at a private members’ club as hospitality.
The Guardian revealed earlier this month that the Ofwat chairman, Iain Coucher, went for dinner with the water company chairs at the Royal Automobile Club in Pall Mall, an exclusive private members’ club, to discuss how to quell public anger over bill rises and sewage spills. But there was no sign of these dinners on his official hospitality logs that were revealed under freedom of information requests from the Liberal Democrats.
No idea why these expensive dinners are still allowed.
If you need to have meetings they should be in a meeting room with custard creams like the rest of us.
This is the best summary I could come up with:
The Guardian revealed earlier this month that the Ofwat chairman, Iain Coucher, went for dinner with the water company chairs at the Royal Automobile Club in Pall Mall, an exclusive private members’ club, to discuss how to quell public anger over bill rises and sewage spills.
But there was no sign of these dinners on his official hospitality logs that were revealed under freedom of information requests from the Liberal Democrats.
The Liberal Democrat environment spokesperson, Tim Farron, said: “This cover-up has confirmed the regulator is not fit for purpose.
No wonder Ofwat aren’t taking tough action when they are being fed fancy dinners by these disgraced firms.
An Ofwat spokesperson said: “We found out that we made a mistake and didn’t give a full list of information to an FoI request.
“We remain focused on holding water companies to account on behalf of customers and have imposed fines and performance penalties worth £250m in the past few years.”
The original article contains 451 words, the summary contains 159 words. Saved 65%. I’m a bot and I’m open source!
