Should anyone find this disgraceful and wish to draw it to the attention of the council’s MP, then write to George Osborne, Chancellor of the Exchequer, in whose constituency this is taking place.
Perhaps he and Hugo Swire could have a little chat about their experiences.
“Councillor Sam Gardener, who was initially the Conservative-run [Cheshire East] council’s deputy cabinet member for finance and assets, resigned after revelations that he failed to disclose that he was barred from being a company director when CEC gave him responsibility for the local authority’s finances in May 2015.
The ban relates to charity donations that failed to reach the intended charity but were transferred into the account of a company in which Mr Gardener was a director. That company subsequently went into liquidation owing creditors £440,000.
You might think it prudent for any prospective cabinet member, let alone one involved in finance, to be closely vetted for any fiscal irregularities but apparently Cheshire East did not.
“I was not obliged under Council rules to disclose the matter of my disqualification as a company director when interviewed for my Cabinet position and the disqualification is in no way incompatible with my duties as a portfolio holder,” said Councillor Gardener.
Mmm… let me consider that for a moment: disqualification from being a company director for financial irregularities is ‘in no way incompatible with my duties as a portfolio holder.’
Councillor Gardener may have had some difficulty selling that to taxpayers (had they known).
So how did CEC react on discovering his disbarment?
“The Council and the residents of Cheshire East have lost the services of a highly talented, sensitive and dynamic young man who has chosen to step down,” said Council Leader Rachel Bailey.
It sounds somewhat reminiscent of the statement made by managing director of the CEC loss-making CoSocius who claimed the company ‘made progress in a number of areas and contributed to the success of other areas.’
(What he didn’t say was that his company somehow managed to lose £800K of taxpayers’ cash in only eleven months trading and notch up a pension deficit of £8.5M.)
Only in Cheshire East could the resignation of a cabinet member disqualified from being a company director for financial irregularities be described as a ‘highly talented, sensitive and dynamic young man.’
Clearly Councillor Bailey was not one of those creditors left with debts of £440K who I suspect would have an altogether different opinion.
I really don’t know what point of reference the CEC leadership uses for evaluating its performance. Undeterred by its mammoth losses at CoSocius they launch two new identical trading companies and describe a disbarred company director as a ‘dynamic young man.’
Residents financing this political circus may use another vocabulary.”
East Devon Watch 
Some people might call diverting charitable donations into a company bank account “financial irregularities”, but I would call it theft and / or fraud and would have expected a police investigation and hopefully prosecution. If that had happened, he would have had a criminal record which he would (presumably) have had to declare when he stood as a Councillor and / or applied to be a member of Cabinet.
Furthermore, it sounds like the company was trading whilst insolvent, which as a director might have made him personally liable or some or all of the debts – but again no one seems to have investigated or pursued him for that.
Finally, it is unclear whether the debts of £440,000 were just the normal company debts or whether this included the charitable donations too. So it could have been more.
How a company can lose so much money in such a short space of time does make you wonder where all that money went.
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