Something you won’t be reading on the Lib Dem spin-site is how Swansea Council’s standards Committee recently cleared Labour councillor Gethin Evans of a contrived allegation by Peter Black.His crime, according to Black, was to reveal that a disciplinary committee, who had spent nearly a year looking into the role of former director David Evans in events leading up to the closure of the leisure centre, had incredibly allowed him to take early retirement - despite being told by the official investigator of "unexplained issues" that remained.
He also made it known that the decision was taken in the face of cross-party opposition and on the casting vote of the Lib Dem chairman.
The disclosure infuriated the Lib Dems spinners who were orchestrating a series of press leaks from the investigation in their eagerness to kick over any remaining traces that would interfere with the continuing fallacy that the closure was all a sinister Labour conspiracy.
Word is that the Ombudsman at first rejected the attempt to involve him in a gagging action. He is even supposed to have made the point that Rene Kinzett, in his former capacity as Administration spin-meister, had actually given out a lot more detail of the proceedings than Evans.
Despite an investigation going ahead over ten months, the standards committee last week threw out the charges and expressed some specific views about the motives of the complainant.
But perhaps a more fitting footnote to this episode is the news that Black was himself censured by the Assembly’s own standards board last month - for revealing confidential committee information.
