NI Water – Page 7 – Slugger O'Toole

NI Water: “As for the minister, he’s not commenting…”

Mick Fealty on August 6, 2010, 11:48 am

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I see Senator Mary White’s husband Padraic is taking on the role of Chair for NI Water. I hope he has a guarantee that he cannot be sacked for failing to address a problem he’s not been told about until he’s actually under investigation. Okay, back to the main story. There’s a nice piece by Martina Purdy which probably sums up most people’s feeling about this Byzantine tale from NI Water. It’s interesting that she concludes with a note that the Minister …

End this FOI game and give us everything (you reasonably can)!

Mick Fealty on August 5, 2010, 6:02 pm

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Hugh Linehan in the Irish Times captures something essential about what Freedom of Information means for public institutions, and that in fact the kind of backwards and forwarding over the precise language of any request is missing the point. He mentions a fascinating paper written by Nat O’Connor for Tasc, in which he argues that democracy is not just about voting, which is actually the last link in the chain, it is also about tracking, criticising government in between elections …

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 …

A new anti NI Water Campaign site?

Mick Fealty on July 28, 2010, 12:39 am

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This site seems to be about the NI Water story. And we hear it is being talked up by some pretty senior people inside the company. However, you can see very little original content without registering (which is odd)… I tried signing up, and it refused to take my details at all… Our interim advice would be that although it could be a genuine attempt to draw out legitimate criticism, for all practical purposes treat it with caution… In the meantime, …

NI Water: Waiting for the FOIs to appear…

Mick Fealty on July 22, 2010, 2:36 pm

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There are some really interesting (unhysterical) conversations (scroll down) being stirred up by the NI Water story, if it can yet be called a story. All we have so far are fragmentary threads the substance of which barely adds up to the sum of the parts. That’s because we are waiting for FOI requests to be returned from some of the several institutional parties to the ‘story’. What matters in all of this is not the sacking of the NEDs …

McParland to become Fianna Fail’s new Deputy General Secretary…

Mick Fealty on July 21, 2010, 1:44 pm

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Now here’s a little adjunct to the NI Water affair, but before our resident conspiracy theorists go off on another one, so far as we can tell it is an adjunct. Pat Parland, who is currently head of their Communications team and sits on that controversial board will be leaving NI Water at the end of August to take up a position as Director of Communications (and Deputy General Secretary) at Fianna Fail in Dublin. Hmmm some might say, from …

NI Water: When is a final report not a final report?

Mick Fealty on July 20, 2010, 1:42 pm

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First, a detail from the Hansard record of the PAC. It comes from Mr Priestly’s opening remarks, so there is no question of his misspeaking under pressure. The review team delivered its final report to me on 18 February. Once I became aware of the problem, swift action was taken. But here’s the problem. Looking at the timeline again, the 18th was the date of the second draft, not the first nor the final, which only officially arrived with the …

NI Water: Contractor starts legal proceedings against MacKenzie and the Bel Tel

Mick Fealty on July 20, 2010, 12:04 pm

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Slugger understands that Sue Holmes – whose contract with NI Water sparked what some might term an internal witch hunt – has started legal proceedings against the Belfast Telegraph and Laurence MacKenzie for an alleged breach of a confidentiality agreement she signed with NI Water. Slugger understands Ms Holmes also has other actions in play. Given Mr MacKenzie’s recent directive against any member of staff talking to UTV, it is not clear how this news will go down inside 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: Dixon was a DRD appointment to the Belfast Harbour Commissioners

Mick Fealty on July 14, 2010, 1:21 pm

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Here’s another little snippet that further highlights the Permanent Secretary’s lack of candour with Stormont’s PAC. When asked by Patsy McGlone about the apparent conflict of interest in pulling Peter Dixon into the Independent Review Team when both the Phoenix Gas CEO and Mr MacKenzie were such close colleagues, Paul Priestly gave this answer: I have known Peter Dixon as a business contact for a couple of years. This is a very small place, so it is inevitable that people …

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 …

Two named (and two unnamed) staff members of NI Water under investigation.

Mick Fealty on July 8, 2010, 12:07 pm

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As reported on Slugger yesterday, two of the MLAs who came under direct attack from Peter Dixon for their role in the Public Accounts Committee’s masterclass interrogation of the Permanent Secretary of DRD and the Chief Executive (and Sub Accounting Officer) of NI Water have written both to the board of Phoenix Gas and their owners, the private equity firm Terra Firma, as to whether or not they support Mr Dixon’s attack on Stormont’s PAC written on Phoenix headed notepaper …