It seems that no local election is complete without its rumours and suggestions of dubious political dealings and local skullduggery, and the current word on the local grapevine is that, in one ward in Sandwell, this upcoming election may do very nicely when it comes to fitting the bill.

The ward in question is Oldbury, which is part of the West Bromwich West constituency that was for many years, until her retirement and elevation to the peerage, represented in parliament by Betty Boothroyd, now Baroness Boothroyd of Sandwell and the UK’s first, and to date only, female Speaker of the House of Commons.

For quite some time there have been hints and rumours that all is not well inside the local Conservative Association in West Bromwich West, rumours that appeared to come fruition last November with the emergence of this story in The Stirrer:

WEST BROM CONSERVATIVES DO THE SPLITS – 24-11-2007

The Stirrer has discovered an amazing split in the ranks of West Bromwich Conservatives. A group of traditionalists led by a former Sandwell Mayor have created a breakaway branch, while the main constituency party is led by former Labour supporters.

Ex-Mayor Bill Archer, his daughter Cllr Elaine Costigan and another councillor Mavis Hughes are part of the separatist movement, which is based around the Wednesbury Conservative club.

Archer confirmed: “There has been a breakaway. One group of people took over and decided to move to Tipton. We wanted to stay on in Wednesbury, so quite legally we formed our own branch.

“They’ve just got different ideas to us, and I’m died in the wool Wednesbury, so I wanted to stay here.”

The division was created when Basharat Khan and a group of former Labour party members switched allegiance and decided to join the Conservatives instead.

Khan was elected Chair of West Bromwich West Tories last year, but says that some of the existing members were in denial.

“There was a small group of us who were in Labour, and before we joined, the Conservatives could have held their meetings in a phone box. We gave them a kick up the backside, and got them organised.

“When I was elected chair, although I won fair and square, some of the councillors never accepted it.

“I’m afraid that there is still an element of racism in the Conservative party.

“We were banned from having meetings at the Wednesbury club, and it was said to me that we would have the Muslim members taking over.

“A that point I just gave up. No branch can have members of just one ethic group. We need to unite and work together.”

Archer vehemently denied that there was any racial motive in the split and rejected Khan’s claims that he and his backers had been banned from Wednesbury.

“That’s absolutely not true,” he said. “And he should be very careful about suggesting racism, as it could cost him an awful lot of money.

“There has never been any mention of racism in any shape or form.

“The club is completely open to them, and they are welcome to come back at any time.”

Now Bill Archer may be much more Cornerstone than Cameroonie in his political views but the widely held consensus around Sandwell, even amongst his political opponents, is that the one thing he isn’t is racist. My understanding is, however, that the real story behind this split in Tory ranks stems from a feeling amongst long-standing members of the local Conservative Association that the group of relatively recent incomers, led by Basharat Khan, have effectively hijacked the association, a feeling that apparently came to a head following an unsuccessful attempt to unseat a sitting Conservative councillor in one of the party’s very few safe seats in Sandwell in favour of one of the newcomers.

Since last November’s split, things do seem to have quietened down however, with the publication of the list of candidates for this year’s election in the Oldbury ward of this constituency, questions have started to be asked about a number of unusual looking coincidences relating to two of the candidates in the seat.

One is the Tory candidate, Abdul Qayyum, the owner of a building firm, RSA Builders Ltd, which operates out of Grange House in Brick Kiln Street, Tipton.

Now, just from the company’s website, we appear to have a couple of administrative issues to sort out.

For one thing, as a limited company, the website should include at least one reference to the business’ company registration number on its ‘about us’ or ‘contact us’ page if not on the home page of the site, much as such a reference needs to be included on any paper letterheads, invoices, etc.

This, naturally leads us to Companies House and its webcheck service, were a quick search of the register turns up a company called RSA Builders Ltd with the company number 04709846 – the only problem with this being that this particular RSA Builders Ltd is based not in Tipton but in Cheshunt, Hertfordshire.

Our ‘RSA Builders Ltd’ is, it seems, actually a company called RSA Property Development Limited, company number 04695887. This company does indeed, have its registered office at Grange House in Tipton and is, in fact, the only company listed on Qayyum’s individual directors’ report. It also appears that both its current annual return and annual accounts are overdue, although only by a few weeks so far.

Now unless there’s some connection between the building firm in Cheshunt, which appears to be registered at a residential address, and Qayyum’s ‘RSA Builders’ then he really shouldn’t be trading under the name ‘RSA Builders Ltd‘ as that’s not the name of the company trading out of Grange House.

Getting back to matters electoral, Qayyum’s business address at Grange House, Tipton, is also given as the address of his election office – my understanding is that he owns Grange House itself but sublets some offices in the building to other tenants – and his election agent is named Ghazanfar Khan. Qayyum’s home address is given in the notice of candidates as an address in Gate Street, Tipton, although this address has, since changes to ward boundaries in Sandwell in 2004, been part of Oldbury ward. The relevance of this information will become apparent shortly.

For a number of years Oldbury ward has been a straight Labour/Conservative fight in which rarely do other parties attempt to intrude. The Lib Dems managed to put up a single token candidate in 2004, when all three seats were contested due to boundary changes, and in 2006, but gave last year a miss, while one has to go back to 2003 to find the last occasion that a minor party contested the seat, when Atma Singh Matharu stood for the Socialist Labour Party, gaining 270 votes.

This year will be the third occasion on which Qayyum has contested the seat – he stood in 2004 and came fifth on the ballot, and second of the three Tory candidates, with 969 votes, while last year he lost a straight fight with a Labour incumbent by over 900 votes.

So far, so routine – or so it seemed until it turned out that, for the first time since 2003, the Socialist Labour Party would be putting up a candidate in Oldbury and not just a candidate but a candidate who was completely new to the political scene in Sandwell and standing for council for what appears to be the very first time in any location.

This candidate’s name is Maureen Matthews, and although she lives at an address in Wednesbury, most of which is in Sandwell, her particular bit of Wednesbury is actually with the Darlaston South Ward , which is part of Walsall, so she’s not resident in Sandwell. However she does qualify to stand as a candidate in Sandwell by virtue of her principle place of employment for the last twelve months being in Sandwell.

In fact, the address of her employer, as given on her nomination papers, is…

Office 2, Grange House, Brick Kiln Street, Tipton.

Grange House? Where have we come across that before?

Oh, yes, of course. Grange House is also the address of RSA Builders Property Services Ltd, the owner of which is Abdul Qayyum, who coincidentally happens to be standing for the Conservatives in the same ward that Maureen Matthews is contesting for Socialist Labour.

How cosy it that?

Maureen Matthews is an employee of Abdul Qayyum, although according to the company, she is currently ‘off sick’ and cannot be contacted at the company’s offices – I do hope its nothing too serious, after all campaigning can be a lot of hard work even if you’re in tip-top shape.

Such an odd coincidence would be noteworthy in itself – its not every day you find an employee standing against their boss in an election – but what makes it all the more interesting is that so far as anyone can ascertain, Maureen Matthews appears to have no connection whatsoever to the ward in which she’s standing, other than it being the same ward that her employer is contesting.

Okay, this is not a certainty – she may have a family connection to the area that no one is currently aware of – but otherwise, she lives in a completely different, if neighbouring, borough and her place of employment is in Tipton Green ward and not Oldbury, so it would be fair to say that a few people have looked and this and struggled to come up with a rational explanation as to why she’s chosen to contest Oldbury ward.

Mmm… Best check the nomination papers, maybe there’s a connection there that everyone’s missing…

…and this is where the coincidences really start to mount up.

As a mentioned earlier, Qayyum (Conservative) lives in Gate Street, Tipton, and to help you follow the next bit, here’s a map of the area:

Gate Street is towards the lower left corner of the map, four streets along from the edge.

Got it? Good…

Now, as you might well expect, Qayyum’s nomination papers show that a number of signatories to his paperwork also live in this same, relatively small geographical area and equally, they are for the most part Pakistani Muslims, just like Qayyum.

There is absolutely nothing unusual in that at all, in fact its precisely what you would expect to see in a local election.

However, Maureen Matthews’ nomination papers also show that the signatories to her paperwork also live, exclusively, in that same small geographical area.

Of the ten signatories to Matthews’ papers, nine are also Pakistani Muslims, of which five have the same surname – Khan. Okay, so its a common surname, but bear with me because there’s more…

One lives on Tividale Road, the main road running left to right along the bottom of the map.

One lives in Danks Street, two streets up from the bottom left and two streets down from Gate Street.

One lives in Church Street, the next road to the right of Gate Street.

Two live in Groveland Road, just to right of the Canal (the blue bit on the map).

And the remaining five live in Holcroft Street, which runs from the middle of Gate Street to the right on the map, joining up with Tividale Street.

To give you a real sense of how curious this all looks, this is a map of the full ward in which the area from which all Matthews’ signatories live is shaded red.

Many of Qayyum’s signatories also live in the same area, in fact one of the pieces of information recorded for each signatory on a candidates’ nomination papers is their polling number and in the case of a number of Matthews’ signatories, the polling number recorded is only a matter of one or two numbers away from that of a signatory on Qayyum’s papers, which often indicates that the individuals in question are either neighbours or even members of the same household.

All a little curious, don’t you think?

And, would you believe, there even more possible coincidences to come.

Matthews’ papers show her to be acting as her own election agent, but operating from an ‘office address’ on Tividale Road.

The address in question turn out to be a Newsagents, the owner of which is, according to the Land Registry, one Mohammed Banaras Khan.

Now this hasn’t been confirmed, so there’s a margin for error to be taken into account, but from what I’ve been told by a member of the local community, Mohammed Banaras Khan may well be the father of Ghazanfar Khan, the same Ghazanfar Khan (allegedly) who is acting as the electoral agent for Abdul Qayyum.

Now that, by anyone’s standards, is a lot of coincidences to take in all in one go, so much so that I’ve given to understand that inquiries are still being made on the ground in an effort to establish whether the suggested father/son relationship between Mohammed Banaras Khan and Ghazanfar Khan does exist, in addition to establishing precisely how the individual signatories appearing on the nominations papers of these two candidates whose poll numbers have been to be within one or two of each other may, or may not, relate to each other or share a familial connection.

Of course, everything laid out above may either have a rational explanation or may equally be just a set of strange looking coincidences of the kind that local politics can and does occasionally throw up.

Nevertheless, there are a few people in and around Oldbury ward looking at this and wondering whether there aren’t a few probing questions that need to be asked about just exactly how much of a coincidence all this is.

UPDATE

Aqiq, in comments, has this to say:

Also you have everything mixed up about RSA Builders. Abdul is the most honest person you will find in Sandwell and i know that RSA builders Ltd is nothing to do with him. So get your facts right.

Really?

Try this…

Individual Director Report Individual Director ABDUL QAYYUM   Nationality: BRITISH Date of Birth: 15/07/1954 Latest Address: 10 GATE STREET, TIPTON, WEST MIDLANDS, DY4 7SP, UK Live Directorships of Trading/Non-Trading Companies: 1 Directorships of Dissolved Companies: 0 Live Directorships of Companies with Insolvency Proceedings: 0 Resigned Directorships: 0   Live Directorships of Trading/Non-Trading Companies   Company Name: RSA PROPERTY DEVELOPMENT LIMITED Registered Number: 04695887 Status: Small Latest Accounts Date: 31/05/2006 Latest Turnover (£ ’000): – Latest Pre-tax Profit (£ ’000): – Latest Net Worth (£ ’000): 115 Position: APPOINTMENT OF COMPANY DIRECTOR Appointment Date: 12/03/2003 Occupation/Function: DIRECTOR   Directorships of Dissolved Companies None Live Directorships of Companies with Insolvency Proceedings None Resigned Directorships None Report Generated: 16/04/2008 © ICC Information Ltd

And…

And…

Not only do I get my facts right, I do evidence as well…