DRD – Page 3 – Slugger O'Toole

NI Water: Minister backs his own action in sacking NEDs

Mick Fealty on August 19, 2010, 9:41 am

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Eamonn reports on Twitter this morning that the Minister is unrepentant about his sacking of NI Water’s four Non Executive Directors on the questionable evidence of an Independent Review Team that was demonstrably connected a priori to the Chief Executive of NI Water and which was partly written by his now suspended Permanent Secretary. The Minister adds that the IRT “got to the core of issues.” Okay, so perhaps the Minister might like to answer those questions we posed for him last …

DRD Permanent Secretary suspended

Pete Baker on August 17, 2010, 6:19 pm

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UTV Live are reporting [added link] that the Department of Regional Development Permanent Secretary Paul Priestly has been suspended pending an investigation. They also reported that NI Regional Development Minister, Sinn Féin’s Conor Murphy, described his permanent secretary’s position as ‘untenable’. Adds From a News Letter report 14 August Mr Murphy, the Sinn Fein minister responsible for sacking all but one of the non-executive directors based on a report by consultants, has said that he has “full confidence” in his …

NI Water: “It was brought to my attention, investigated and I took action.”

Pete Baker on August 12, 2010, 7:33 pm

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As well as revealing his “reservations” about police services, the Northern Ireland Regional Development Minister, Sinn Féin’s Conor Murphy, also gave the Irish News his first recorded comments about the troubled NI Water Board, and his emergency appointees. Or, rather, his first recorded comments about the questions surrounding the Independent Review Team. From the Irish News Mr Murphy said he believed people with an “axe to grind” were querying the inquiry. “What I am aware of is there has been a campaign to attack …

NI Water: DRD had form in procurement issues…

Mick Fealty on August 5, 2010, 1:25 pm

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Now, I imagine that the former Chair of NI Water Chris Mellor is not too pleased with his mention in this week’s Private Eye. Not least because it links him and his fellow sacked non executive directors directly to issues around procurement at time when the health regulator Monitor, of which he is currently the deputy chair, is looking at opening up procurement in the NHS. The ‘Eye’ alludes to his sacking and PAC chair Paul Maskey’s remarks about the …

NI Water: “The permanent secretary accidently hit the caps button”

Mick Fealty on August 5, 2010, 12:38 pm

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The News Letter this morning picks up on our ‘scoop’, the email from Permanent Secretary Paul Priestly to the Auditor General, Kieran Donnelly, and asks DRD for clarification of what was going on with those BLOCK CAPs of his: “The permanent secretary did not make recommendations on behalf of the IRT. The permanent secretary was not suggesting any course of action in the investigation. The permanent secretary accidentally hit the caps button – it was not an instruction to Mr Donnelly.” Well, …

NI Water: “I think it would be helpful for you to meet them…”

Mick Fealty on August 2, 2010, 4:20 pm

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Okay, we now have some documents of our own to share. The first is an email sent from Peter Dixon to Paul Priestley and copied to Jackie Henry and Glenn Thompson, Mr Dixon’s fellow members of the Independent Review Team on foot of who’s report the Minister sacked the four NEDs at NI Water. It’s the text of the letter that was sent to the Chair of the PAC on Phoenix headed notepaper. The same letter that Mr Dixon withdrew …

NI Water: On the Chinese walls between DRD and NI Water…

Mick Fealty on August 2, 2010, 2:02 pm

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Today is the deadline for DRD to get the text of the first two drafts of the IRT’s report requested by them at the PAC meeting on July 1st. It will then be up to chair Paul Maskey as to whether he chooses to share it immediately, or hold off until the next committee meeting in September. If/when it does finally emerge, we’ll be checking the text carefully for significant changes between v1 of 15th February and v2 18th February …

NI Water: Board prevented from acting on contents of Internal Audit?

Mick Fealty on July 30, 2010, 5:12 pm

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The Coalition government at Westminster clearly attach great public importance to Non Executive Directors on Departmental Boards. On his appointment as lead Non Executive Director to the Government, Lord Browne of Madingley laid out this description of the role of NEDs to departmental boards: “This is a role within Government but also independent of it. Its purpose is to assist in the delivery of policy using relevant experience from business. There is a great need for the best of the …

NI Water: What was Dixon’s competence to adjudicate on a GoCo/NDPB?

Mick Fealty on July 19, 2010, 3:48 pm

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Gerry Loughran’s letter to John Dallat re NI Water makes for interesting reading (Update: the BBC covered the letter story this evening). Loughran is Peter Dixon’s Chair at Phoenix Gas, and a former head of the Northern Ireland Civil Service. In his response leaves both John Dallat, and Paul Maskey, the chair of the PAC whom he dutifully copies in, in no doubt of his view of Mr Dixon’s intemperate outburst the week before last: Mr Dixon was aggrieved by …

NI Water Timeline: “Administrative procedures are the responsibility of management…”

Mick Fealty on July 16, 2010, 10:55 am

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I’ve been working on a timeline of the NI Water story just to try and put some of the material we have into some kind of objective order… I’ve gone for completion rather than trying to hone in on any one aspect… However a number of things jump out… One is how long Priestly is in post before any of the problems identified by MacKenzie emerge (Hansard also tells us Nicola Brennan conducted three successive audits without finding them either). Two, …

NI Water: DRD kept their ‘demonstrable independence’ hidden from Commissioner

Mick Fealty on July 15, 2010, 9:30 am

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Yesterday’s written answer from the Minister of DRD to Patsy McGlone’s AQW will bring some disquiet, particularly in light of the aribitrary manner by which his department dealt with the last Board at NI Water. What DRD understands by the word ‘independent’ is not something many people in business or the wider world would recognise. But this is DRD world, where ‘independence’ – it seems – is just a state of mind… For example the minister tells us he received an …

NI Water: Were the IRT’s Terms of Reference ‘Gerrymandered’?

Mick Fealty on July 13, 2010, 3:19 pm

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The latest we hear is that DRD/NIW are having problems getting anyone to take on the role of chairman of NI Water. Slugger understands that a number of individuals have declined an approach. It is not difficult to see why. As a careful reading of the final report makes clear the IRT itself did not believe there was a substantive connection between the CEO’s problems with a Board that refused to rescind his resignation and the report’s headline problem of …

NI Water: “No, I do not believe that there was a conflict of interest.”

Mick Fealty on July 12, 2010, 9:00 am

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Slugger understands that there is growing unease amongst members of Stormont’s Public Accounts Committee with Peter Dixon’s unprecedented attack on the Committee’s line of inquiry, and the apparent silence on the matter from their own chair, Paul Maskey. This passage from Hansard is illustrative of the line which drew fire from the Phoenix Gas CEO: Ms Purvis: On the back of that, Chairperson, I raised the point with the regulator last week that Peter Dixon was to head up the independent review team. …

DRD and NI Water officials told not to co-operate with UTV…

Mick Fealty on July 8, 2010, 3:27 pm

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Slugger understands that UTV have been taking a very close interest in the NI Water story about the sacked non executives, possibly for a documentary programme in the late summer, and before the next scheduled meeting of the PAC. Now it seems that officials in DRD, headed up by Conor Murphy’s Permanent Secretary, Paul Priestly and NI Water, headed up by CEO Laurence McKenzie (‘They tell me I’m being autocratic – I say – get used to it”), have been …

Exclusive report on NI Water: “I need help from friends at the minute…”

Mick Fealty on July 5, 2010, 3:00 pm

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What was the real reason for the big shake-up at NI Water last week? Four independent directors sacked last March were replaced by temporary appointees on the grounds that a relatively tiny number of transactions had been conducted poorly. But was this a post-hoc rationalisation for a decision that was taken for other, more political reasons?