The mayor of the borough of Tower Hamlets, Lutfur Rahman, was told to vacate his post immediately, after an election court judge declared the results of the 2014 mayoral race void.
The Bangladesh-born politician was banned from seeking office again and ordered to pay £250,000 costs after he was found to have allocated local grants to buy votes.
Petitioners against him alleged that Britain’s first directly elected Muslim mayor had won the ballot after a campaign of “intimidation and corruption,” the Guardian reported yesterday.
Judge Richard Mawrey QC handed down his verdict yesterday after a 10-week hearing at the Royal Courts of Justice.
Lutfur Rahman was kicked out of office after being found guilty of widespread corruption in seeking office last May. The mayoral election in the east London borough will be rerun.
Rahman and his supporters were found to have been involved in vote-rigging, seeking spiritual influence through local imams and wrongly branding his Labour rival a racist.
The court heard that a voter was seen crying outside a polling station after allegedly being told by a supporter of Rahman that it was “un-Islamic” not to vote for him and that not voting for him meant one was “not a good Muslim.”
A Bangla-language newspaper, The Weekly Desh, published a letter signed by 101 Islamic leaders whose pronouncements had been used to cajole and control many within the local 65,000-strong Muslim community, the court heard.
Bribes were also used to win over voters, the court heard, with meals handed out on election day. There was evidence of “interference with voters,” including in polling booths.
The court heard evidence from a handwriting expert that hundreds of ballot papers might have been filled out by the same person.
The mayor denied the allegations, calling them politically motivated.
Mawrey said Rahman had sought to play the “race and Islamaphobia card” throughout the election and would no doubt do so after this judgment.
The conduct of Rahman’s supporters on polling day has caused “considerable disquiet,” the judge added.
The Guardian quoted the mayor of London, Boris Johnson, as saying: “I’m very glad that justice has taken its course and that a cloud has been lifted from Tower Hamlets. It is vital now that we move on with new elections and ensure that something like this can never happen again.”