It is all too easy to get away with fraud if there is no effective scrutiny of academy finances – and it is the education of our young people that suffers.
George Osborne wanted every school to be an academy, free of local government control – and scrutiny.
The founder of a flagship free school and two members of staff have been found guilty of defrauding the government out of £150,000.
Sajid Raza, 43, Shabana Hussain, 40, and Daud Khan, 44, made payments from Department for Education grants into their own bank accounts. The grants were given to set up Kings Science Academy in Bradford in 2011. It opened in 2012.
The three were found guilty at Leeds Crown Court following a six-week trial.
They were granted bail and will be sentenced in September with judge Christopher Batty telling them “I am very much considering custody in each of your cases”.
Peter Mann from the Crown Prosecution Service said the trio had “treated public money as their own”. He said: “Far from being a model school, Raza [founder and principal] treated the Academy like a family business employing his relatives there and, for at least the first 12 months, operating with no proper governance.”
“His co-defendants were also drawn into this criminality. Hussain, Raza’s sister, received unlawful payments, and Khan helped to falsify documentation.”
East Devon Watch 
So George Osbourne is both a facilitator of fraud and a nominee for the Companion of Honour (which is apparently given to “to recognise services of national importance” – like Stephen Hawking).
Oddly enough, these things seem to me to be incompatible…
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