from amicus.cc

Monday, 12 September 2005, 11:08:04am

Baylissgate Day 17

All Hell broke loose at and after the Executive meeting last Wednesday. General Secretary Simpson gave an extraordinary 30 minute rant about 'former friends out to get him' and about this website. He changed tack very quickly from a report on Baylissgate into an account of a plot to destabilise his leadership and the union as a whole. He attacked union employees, ex-employees, trustees, lay regional secretaries and the editor of this website, everyone except Bayliss, all in terms that might well prove to be defamatory in court.

The very next day he suspended three senior officials who are also leading members of the Left 'Gazette' group that got him and half the Executive elected. The editor of the Gazette publication Des Heemskerk and the union's Head of Purchasing Cathie Willis were escorted off the premises. The chair of the Gazette group, Jimmy Warne, has yet to learn of his suspension as he is on holiday in Greece. All three have still not been informed of why they were suspended but it is obvious that Simpson believes (erroneously as he will discover) that they leaked the Baylissgate documents to this website.

The meeting was confused but it seems the executive voted to approve this extract from the (secret) General Purposes and Finance Committee report:

"The General Secretary be authorised to take the necessary steps to: Investigate the source of the defamatory allegations and unauthorised disclosure and circulation of internal union documents Conduct a further investigation into, and consideration of, the legal and rule implications and options [i.e. suing www.amicus.cc and expelling David Beaumont].
A statement should be circulated within the union to make clear that amicus.cc’s false allegations were spurious and incorrect."

So there we have it, a secret investigation into Bayliss where the allegations are never disclosed and the report never published, compared to a kangaroo trial of three leading members of the Left in the union, where their crimes and guilt are read out to the executive before they are even informed, suspended, charged or investigated. So much for the union's conference slogan 'no power without accountability'. All we need now is for the three to 'fess up to their wicked crimes in a show trial and the farce will be complete.

At the same meeting Simpson got the Executive to postpone ALL rule amendments arising from the democratic Rules Conference of May 2005, until January 2006. This includes the election of full time officials and the removal of the ageist ban on older members holding lay office. By January the rule changes may be subsumed by the Mega Union Merger project anyway. Delegates to Rules Conference may wonder why they bothered. This unprecedented deferment of rule changes is almost certainly unlawful and many bed blocking members are considering submitting complaints to the Trade Union Certification Officer, as are the construction sector.

In all this heat some light did actually emerge from Simpson about Baylissgate. Apparently the two did not go to South Africa on a jolly paid for by Fauna and Flora International and we are happy to dispel that allegation. Also the 2005 investigation into Bayliss concerned matters other than original charges, i.e. some new ones to do with bills for 'Medical World'. Therefore it is possible that Deputy General Secretaries Dubbins and Sweeney did indeed find 'no evidence whatsoever' of the new charges if their investigation was limited in scope to just those new allegations. However it's difficult to comment without us (or the Executive) knowing exactly what the charges were or what the investigation concluded. We do know that Simpson admitted to the Executive that the 2005 complaint about Bayliss included the original 'Mr X' allegations. Therefore it is very difficult to exonerate Simpson for his incredible memo claiming there was no evidence whatsoever.
[reinstatethethree] Re-instate the suspended Amicus three
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