The mayor of Tower Hamlets has been 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 after Lutfur 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.
Rahman, who has been banned from seeking office again, was also found to have allocated local grants to buy votes. He was ordered to pay £250,000 costs.
Judge Richard Mawrey QC handed down his verdict on Thursday after a 10-week hearing at the Royal Courts of Justice.
A group of four residents had called for last year’s mayoral election, in which Rahman triumphed over Labour rival, John Biggs, to be declared void and rerun.
The group of voters was led by Andy Erlam, who stood as a councillor on an anti-corruption ticket. He said: “It is a fantastic result for democracy. There will have to be a new election of mayor. Mr Rahman cannot stand.”
Rahman, Britain’s first directly elected Muslim mayor, won the ballot after a campaign of “intimidation and corruption,” the petitioners alleged.
Mawrey was asked to consider if the election was fraudulent and should be rerun. If Rahman was found to be responsible, he faced being banned from office.
The mayor denied the allegations, which he dismissed as cynical and politically motivated.
The judge said Rahman had sought to play the “race and Islamaphobia card” throughout the election and would no doubt do so after this judgment. “He was an evasive witness – Rahman was no doubt behind illegal and corrupt practices,” Mawrey said.
The conduct of Rahman’s supporters on polling day has caused “considerable disquiet,” the judge continued. “The evidence laid before this court, limited though it necessarily was to the issues raised in the petition, has disclosed an alarming state of affairs in Tower Hamlets.
“This is not the consequence of the racial and religious mix of the population, nor is it linked to any ascertainable pattern of social or other deprivation. It is the result of the ruthless ambition of one man. The real losers in this case are the citizens of Tower Hamlets.”
Following the judgment, the mayor of London, Boris Johnson, said: “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.”
During the hearing, the court heard evidence from a handwriting expert that hundreds of ballot papers carried marks suggesting they could have been filled out by the same person.
Rahman was also accused of making false statements about the personal character of Biggs and of “undue influence” during the campaign and on polling day.
It was claimed that a Bengali newspaper, The Weekly Desh, published a letter signed by 101 Islamic leaders which was “intended to have undue influence on the Muslim population of the borough,” said barrister Francis Hoar, representing the four residents. Their pronouncements had been used to cajole and control many within the local 65,000-strong Muslim community, it was claimed.
The court heard that one of the petitioners saw a voter 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 if you did not vote for him you were “not a good Muslim.”
Bribes were also used to win over voters, the court heard, with meals handed out on election day. Hoar said there was evidence of “interference with voters,” including in polling booths.
Rahman won the poll in the first round of the election, with 43%, and Biggs was second on 33%. In the runoff round, he beat the Labour candidate by 52.7% to 47.7%.
The long-awaited verdict comes after the communities secretary, Eric Pickles, ordered a team of commissioners to ensure the council is properly run after a PwC report last year found it flouted spending rules.
Pickles took control of key functions of administration when he appointed three commissioners to oversee grant-giving, appointments, property deals and the administration of future elections in the borough.
Other functions such as education, social care provision, street cleaning, housing and homelessness services were unaffected by this move.
Rahman denied any wrongdoing in council spending, as well as the allegations surrounding last year’s mayoral election.
