There was a time in my memory when clergy were allowed to work without the constraints of safeguarding rules and health and safety awareness. It was not, by any means, a golden era. Two episodes still haunt me from my curacy days in the 1970s, when I ended up in the casualty department of a hospital with an injured child. In neither case was I, the organiser of the outing, held responsible as each were deemed pure accidents. I suspect that today’s risk sensitive culture might want to take a different view. The most important fact abut these episodes is that in neither case was the damage sustained by the child serious. The main thing I note here is that attitudes to risk and safety in church and elsewhere were not such a high priority in my early days of ministry.
But, in recalling these days of risk innocence, as I can call them, I have to confess that things did not always work out so well. One particular episode involved my then Vicar taking a gamble over the integrity of a troubled young man whom he took in as a lodger at the Vicarage in my parish. The young man was then, in 1973, about 29 and, from the details I picked up, he had had a troubled past. This included a chaotic home life as a child and later episodes of homelessness. Charlie, as I shall call him, did however have a strong outgoing personality and soon ingratiated himself with the congregation. He had no full-time job but busied himself around the church plant and acted as an informal caretaker. Charlie made it his business to get on with me. Not only were we fellow lodgers at the Vicarage, but he wanted to help at the youth club which met on a Sunday night in the church hall, and which was under my charge. All went well for many months, and it was helpful to have another adult to help supervise the games and activities that I laid on for the young people. There was nevertheless something not quite right in his behaviour which I could not name. I was careful never to allow him to be alone with the young people, especially the girls. Suddenly, everything fell apart for Charlie in the course of a single evening. He had what appeared to be a psychotic episode and began to shout and to molest some of the girls in front of everyone. Fortunately, the Vicar was able to come and take control of what was a very difficult situation. Charlie left the following day and I never heard from him again. There was, incidentally, no talk of referring him on to a specialist mental health professional.
What are my thoughts on this difficult situation after a gap of almost fifty years? From a safeguarding and health and safety perspective, Charlie was, and probably always had been, high risk. But there was something else going in the situation which, I believe, links it to recent events in the Diocese of London. The Vicar’s acceptance of Charlie into his confidence and home seemed to be telling us something about the Vicar’s own needs. The area of London where we found ourselves was quite cosmopolitan and the Vicar was an ambitious Cambridge graduate. From my perspective, there seemed always to be a tension between his social background and the mainly working-class status of his parishioners. Indeed, he appeared not to like many of them and some confided to me that this feeling was mutual. Possibly the act of investing considerable trust in Charlie was a way for the Vicar to relieve his feelings of dissonance and alienation. Charlie was his ‘tame’ working class friend and through him he was attempting to show himself as a contemporary modern man for whom class was of no importance. The very keenness to befriend Charlie demonstrated, paradoxically, that for him class mattered a great deal. Something similar was happening among those who were lionising Jimmy Savile during the same period. Savile knew how to work an over-familiar cloying charm on his establishment victims. These were the ones who gave him his opportunities for abuse. Charlie and Savile were both adepts at allowing the privileged to feel socially sophisticated because of the faux friendships they offered to a member of another class. In Charlie’s case the mesmerising came to an end before the damage had been allowed to become too serious.
In retrospect, the act of trusting Charlie, whatever the reason, had been highly dangerous. To be fair to my Vicar, the potentially disastrous situation was partly created by the risk innocence I have referred to. The church structures of the time also did little to help. There was no system of record checks, independent advice or any kind of risk assessment process. Clergy, like my Vicar, were left to struggle by themselves with whatever wisdom and common-sense they possessed. Sometimes this was insufficient, and their naivety and inexperience could lead them to places of extreme danger. Also, there was the fact that clergy desperately want to do the right Christian thing and offer forgiveness to those who sought it. The penitent sinner is hard to resist especially if he/she is one who has struggled through a lifetime of setbacks in the relationships they have made. Charlie was, by all appearances, one of these converted sinners. Currently, clergy are less likely to follow their gut instincts but rather seek advice from a professional. The modern profession of safeguarding offers the church of today a way to help a clergyperson find a way through some of the moral dilemmas facing them. The new world we have created for ourselves in the Church is a safety-first world. Safety and a desire for protection from disasters and mistakes replace a reliance on instinct and gut feeling which ruled in the past.
The current Martin Sargeant saga seems to be, though on a completely different scale, another Charlie story. I am assuming that most of my readers will be familiar with the broad outlines of the way that Sargeant, a man with a prison record, stole £5 million from the Diocese of London after being put in charge of some of its funds. There are still a number of anomalies in the account about exactly what went on and to whom precisely he was answerable. Nevertheless, in this story, there are some striking parallels with the story of Charlie. Sargent’s tale is another account of an apparently repentant sinner who arrives at a church and becomes trusted because he is useful. The skills Sargeant possessed proved to be ones that are not commonly found among church people – financial wizardry and property development. Such a man becomes looked up to by many people because of these skills. Eventually he acquires real power, while the original dark background of his thefts and imprisonment becomes forgotten or supressed. In retrospect we can ask why were there no checks and auditing? Clearly, particularly by the standards of today, these administrative failings were massive. But, by the standards of what was common practice among clergy trained forty or fifty years ago, i.e. the Bishop and the senior diocesan staff who worked with Sargeant, the situation is perhaps a little more understandable. Having known Richard Chartres, the former Bishop of London, a little in the early years of his ministry, I recognise the clerical omnicompetence that he seemed to exhibit from the very start. Most of the time, Chartres seems to have able to use his gifts of apparently reliable judgment to good effect. Many in the Church and beyond were also impressed by his quick intellect and impressive gift for public speaking. This allowed him to reach the very pinnacle of the CoE’s hierarchy. But, in the process of appointing or, at any rate, acquiescing in the appointment of Sargeant, and then failing to oversee his actual work in the diocese, Chartres is now seen to have been trapped by the ubiquitous risk innocence I spoke about above. This, I suggest, was shared by many of his contemporaries among the clergy. What at the time may have seemed to be an inspired appointment turned out to be a major calamity. This is one that will for ever taint his legacy. In a nutshell, the Bishop apparently believed that his assessment of Sargeant was sound, and that he could allow the normal checks and balances of regular employment practice to be bypassed. It was a high-risk decision by the Bishop and one that has backfired badly.
There is, I believe, the further aspect in the Sargeant story which is suggestive of a further link to my Vicar’s relationship with Charlie. I was, obviously, not close to the Chartres/Sargeant relationship but this attempt to understand its dynamic seems a reasonable one and is based on the publicly available information. The first fact to be considered is that Sargeant, from the descriptions of him as a ‘fixer’, came, like Charlie, from fairly humble social origins. Was Sargeant also fulfilling a similar role for Bishop Chartres as Charlie had appeared to provide for my Vicar? Was Chartres benefitting from being able to show an apparent high level of social kudos and sophistication by having, apparently in an atmosphere of relaxed informality, a working-class man like Sargeant working for him? Working closely with Sargeant would have helped Chartres to claim that he was a true man of the people, at the same time as he was mixing with royalty and other well-connected folk in society. At some point, one can imagine a firm loyalty, even personal friendship, developing between the two men, one which could ignore any social dissonance. Any criticisms about Sargeant that Chartres might have picked up from his staff could be sat on firmly as suggesting, on the part of the complainant, some social prejudice. I find it hard to believe that Sargeant never attracted any criticism in the nine or so years he worked as Head of Operations in the diocese. One possible explanation for this is that he was always protected by the Bishop on each occasion. My reading of the overall situation is that Chartres did indeed invest in Sargent an enormous amount of his personal trust and loyalty. The way that Sargeant survived in his post for so long can perhaps be attributed to the near veneration and personal loyalty that Chartres seems to have felt for his right-hand man. Was this depth of loyalty also felt by other senior staff in the London Diocese or was it the protection of the Bishop alone that kept him in post and allowed him so much power? That discussion is going on currently within the diocese and I imagine we have not heard the last of the story.
This blog post has turned to be about one major issue that afflicted the Church in years gone by. The culture of the Church in the past allowed the clergy a great deal of freedom (excessive?) to manage things exactly as they wished. There was much scope for mistakes and too little support for all the variety of tasks the clergy had to undertake. The expectations of clerical omnicompetence had some dire consequences. The apparent failings and catastrophic losses in the Diocese of London are perhaps good examples of how this past independence culture still exerts a powerful influence today in some areas. What the future should set down as correct behaviour for clergy remains to be seen. Somewhere there has to be a balance between excess independence and a responsible deference to true expertise.
Sargeant appeared to have groomed clergy quite effectively, by earning favours from the grant disbursements he had power over. I’m sure he was very unpopular with some, but had a protective shield of senior approval around him, allowing the fraud to continue for years. Rarely does deceit on this scale (£5m) endure in isolation. Persons wittingly or unwittingly enable it to continue.
If I were a bishop reading this I’d be very concerned about being held responsible for similar defalcations in other domains. The Church is cash poor but property rich. How many others have misplaced trust in others to manage property portfolios and their complex finance?
Sargeant was off the books as far as employment law appears to have been concerned, neatly bypassing any internal controls there may have been over sign-offs and accountability. He was engaged as a contractor. Typically he might have fallen foul of IR35 regulations, but maintained the illusion of other work not least by the property portfolio he had amassed personally, ironically by utilising Church funds. Normally the regular (weekly?) trips to USA would have aroused suspicion in other employees or even the dullest auditors, but I suspect his role in operations was obscured by his contractual status. “He obviously had independent means didn’t he”. That these were derived from his thieving completes the deception.
Stephen is right. There is a ridiculous level of autonomy and lack of accountability for Church leaders. Obviously this is bad news for others, particularly the poor parishes which should have benefited from the stolen funds. But it’s also highly dangerous for the bishops themselves, whose freedom to do almost as they please persists longer in this realm than in virtually any other walk of life.
As auditors adjust risk levels on Church audits, the media report, and even members reluctantly look up, expect further disasters to emerge.
A search of Martin Sargeant, also Martin James Sargeant born October 1969 (one and the same person) at Companies’ House reveals a small network of companies of which Sargeant was a director. You have to continue the searches within each company linked by clicking on ‘People’ for details of directorships. Not all are church-related and some refer to his property interests.
https://find-and-update.company-information.service.gov.uk/search?q=Martin+Sargeant+
The circumstances of his appointments to the church-related companies are not apparent; for some information about companies and directorships you need to have an account with Companies’ House. On another search engine for company directorships there is one entry which refers to Martin Sargeant as a Clerk in Holy Orders. Without further research it’s not possible to say whether this was a ‘puff’ on his part or (as I tend to suspect) an editorial mistake.
There’s another entirely separate angle to this saga which has been hotly debated on ‘Thinking Anglicans’. Sargeant’s previous conviction with imprisonment for 21 months was in 1995. By the operation of the Rehabilitation of Offenders Act 1974 the conviction would be ‘spent’ after ten years, so that for employment purposes he effectively had ‘a clean record’ by 2005. Views about the effect of this differ, but the 1974 Act is explicit in its language and I have not found anything which would place Sargeant outside its scope.
In fact, on reviewing the core material, I have found several separate directorship entries referring to Sargeant as a Clerk in Holy Orders. I suspect it might be a day’s work to identify all of the directorship connections (I don’t have that time!). It’s probably a job for a forensic accountant. Furthermore, Sargeant was appointed to some directorships before his conviction was spent. That is not, in itself, illegal but indicates that searches were either not made or were disregarded. His conviction would have remained on record in those years.
An enigma on several levels.
There’s little doubt that the high level of trust given to him, contributed to the scale of his recidivism. Not very wise.
After only 2 years’ in Bedford, Chartres spent the next decade at Runcie’s side. Runcie ‘made’ Chartres and, it might be said, effectively trained him (Runcie’s influence at Cuddesdon lingered after his departure for St Albans in 1969-70). Runcie would have taught Chartres at least 2 essential lessons: (i) to leave the business of management to professional managers; and (ii) to concentrate on keeping the Church together. To this end, Runcie failed to exercise any supervision over the Church Commissioners as they were forced into speculative investments to meet the unreasonable demands for pensions and stipends placed on them by foolish General Synods, and he also dissipated vast amounts of time and energy in appeasing Church parties, whose interests were often mutually exclusive. I am not a fan.
Therefore, when Chartres succeeded David Hope in 1995 (shortly after the ordination of women became possible – an acutely controversial matter in London diocese), the imperative was to unite a diocese notorious for its extremes of opinion, with a large phalanx of hardline Anglo-Catholics looking back with wistfulness upon Graham Leonard (a largely malign influence), but conscious of the need to propitiate Dick Lucas at Bishopsgate. The need to appease Bishopsgate (and to nurture HTB) became especially pressing when the full burden of stipends fell upon DBFs in 1995, followed soon after by the full burden of pension accruals from 1998. Having lost Essex and half Hertfordshire, there was little in the way of glebe endowments; the great (and notorious) Bayswater/Paddington estates had long been appropriated by the Commissioners. The remaining assets needed to be sweated if the wage bill was to be met.
This meant that bishops like Chartres had, more than ever before, to become managers, a task to which they were often ill-suited. Therefore, the need for a trusted middleman, fixer or consigliere would become imperative: someone who could interface between the various interests which Chartres had to satisfy and the often mediocre diocesan bureaucracy. To some extent, Chartres had himself played this role for Runcie, but without the necessity of dirtying his hands with money matters. Yet there are so many instances of fixers playing both sides of each trade and/or creaming cash for themselves. Chartres was happy – very happy – with having a middleman who seemed to bring results. The diocese flourished (or appeared to flourish, thanks to Bishopsgate and HTB) in the face of decline everywhere else. Chartres had found a willing formula; by dint of some spiritual alchemy he had turned base metal into gold, and Sargeant was his apprentice. Little wonder that it seems no active supervision was undertaken and Sargeant was able to play the system like a violin.
If diocesan bureaucracies were abolished, to yield economies of scale, none of this nonsense would ever have been necessary. Sargeant was almost bound to happen.
I should add that Lord Chartres’ father in law, Sir Alan McLintock, who had led the Woolwich (and had a long connection with the board of EI), probably played a major role in the transformation of Church finance in 1995-98, along with the then first church estates commissioner, Sir Michael Colman. I suspect that the McLintock connection may have fortified any belief Chartres had in ‘professional management’. However, the long-term effects of swinging from one extreme form of finance (where the Commissioners bore most of the burden) to another (where the parishes bear almost the entirety of the burden) are plain to see: a Church in an advanced death spiral, even in London.
‘In Charlie’s case the mesmerising came to an end before the damage had been allowed to become too serious.’
I wonder if this is another case of ‘risk innocence’ (I like that term!)? Who knows what the damage might have been to the girls Charlies molested that evening at the youth club? In those days we weren’t allowed to talk about the harm done.
‘In Charlie’s case the mesmerising came to an end before the damage had been allowed to become too serious.’
I hope that’s true, but wonder whether this is another case of ‘risk innocence’? (I like that term!)
What was the damage to the girls who were molested that night at the youth club? An incident like that can have a lasting effect – which at the time often wasn’t recognised. We were expected to shrug off such assaults, but for many of us that didn’t prove easy. Were the girls offered any support?
Sorry to have posted twice – the first didn’t appear so I thought I’d forgotten to press ‘Post Comment’. Then when I did the second one, both appeared at once!
The shock engendered by Charlie’s behaviour was more in connection with his wild irrationality than the ‘molesting’. I spare my readers details but it did not appear to faze the two or three girls directly affected by Charlie’s behaviour. More dangerous would have been long-term grooming behaviour of which there was none.
Stephen, thanks for this. I think the term ‘risk innocence’ is very helpful, and explains much of the cultural differences between then and now.
Despite the gains of ‘risk suspicion’ in terms of protection, I think you are hinting at the losses too—a risk aversion, which makes people more naturally suspicious.
I think, though, that the issue with Sargeant is deeper. First, the appalling lack of due process, which is an organisational basic, and is still lacking in much of the C of E.
Second, the deference given to bishops which inhibits the asking of straightforward questions. Because of the power dynamic, I still find my fellow clergy very reticent to ask important questions in just about every public context. It is still often seen as disrespectful and unwelcome. One result of this, for example, is that Diocesan Synods are dysfunctional and many diocesan strategies lack any accountability.
I agree, Ian.
At our rehearsal for the ordination to the diaconate in 1987, I pointed out that the licence, which was supposed to contain my full name, had left out my middle name. On hearing, for the first time, that we would be required to swear an oath at this ceremony, I asked if we could see it beforehand. The bishop later described both these points as ‘threatening’. That was a long time ago, admittedly, but nothing has changed.
In the same year, the C of E published a report criticising Freemasons for, among other things, requiring members to swear an oath without seeing it beforehand!
Church is very often a closed system. For example if you leave, you no longer particularly exist for the many who remain. Data can only be taken in if it is internally generated. Learning can only come from the top. Status only comes from anointing which is never lost.
To look outside is to compromise, a deadly sin. Reason is set aside in favour of deference. Ironically right and wrong are flexible depending on who says so. Whole value systems are left at the door.
Without the earthing of reality, Sargeants are inevitable and repeatedly predictable, as is inexorable decline.
As Stephen writes risk and safety were not such a priority in churches when we grew up. I used to climb ladders to the niches high up changing candles in the Bodley church. No one could have stopped me as I loved a challenge. Perhaps there was more trust then in faith.
And more accidents?
Reflecting on these comments, I recalled the inter schools Christian camps I attended. They had an almost cavalier disregard for health and safety. On one walk in the mountains of Scotland, a rock was dislodged, cascaded down and narrowly missed the head of one of the teenagers. The delegated leader, a foolhardy machismo type older boy had chosen the wrong path in the mist.
I wasn’t much bothered by washing and hygiene in those youthful days, but didn’t enjoy the vomiting bug we all succumbed to.
On another trip we we urged to do a 42 mile sponsored walk (to make it worthy). Very few completed it, but many were injured and put off the pleasure of country walking. As an experienced walker now I rarely walk more than 20 miles in a day. Largely we we weren’t experienced or trained. This is in contrast with school mountain trips which were much more carefully planned and controlled.
I’d be surprised if the same risks would be taken nowadays. Perhaps there is too much mollycoddling, but I suspect there is more awareness of the damage done in former years and the cost to lives and families.
At times the Church seems intent on keeping its head in the sand about abuse predators and the dangers they represent, and seems decades behind the rest of the world in catching up with a proper approach.
I’ve not been on for a while, and hadn’t heard of the Sergeant business. So, two brief points. There was an innocence of potential victims, too. I had my boobs groped in public on a couple of occasions when I was a teenager. I took it as a lack of respect, mostly. Which of course, it was. Boys, very immature, then as now! trying to display prowess with girls. I didn’t like it much, but I didn’t brood over it. Boys were childish, meh! As for some of the comments about clergy knowing everything once they’re ordained and senior clergy brooking no questioning….. well, I’ll go to the foot of our stairs! And I’m not convinced it’s changed much!
I hope everyone is having a joyous Christmas.
‘Safety first’ is in contrast with the Bible, I find, where murderers such as Moses, David and Paul became God’s chosen leaders. Not much chance of that nowadays.
‘No one can follow me unless he takes up his cross… He who seeks to save his life will lose it…. unless a seed falls into the ground and dies it remains alone.’ Not much concern about personal safety there.
No horrible DBS checks then either. I hate the system, with its smearing assumption that all of us are perverts until proved otherwise. So degrading to us all.
In the parable, Jesus did not advocate eliminating the tares which is what we seem to be trying to do. Better for the church to be let down by the Judas Iscariots of this world than to force people out.
How as an observer can you tell ‘gut instinct’ from compassion? And whatever happened to guidance from the Holy Spirit?
We were biblically exhorted to obey the law of the land weren’t we? I’m not sure I accept it’s horrible being DBS checked. I didn’t notice anything last time I was done, some years ago mind.
I’m sure our resident theologians can address some of these points David. My own take is that murder was never right, nor a qualification for leadership. Life was cheaper in biblical times and genocide regularly occurred, just as it continues in modern times. People have a way of deciding things are God’s will, whether it is or not.
Church leaders have a habit of corroborating their own will as being the Holy Spirit’s guidance. The more power they have the more they do it.
Christ’s lived life was in marked contrast with the religious accepted beliefs of the day. He served others, washed their feet in contrast to his disciples’ wanting to call down fire on people they disagreed with. But you know all this anyway David.
It is somewhat intrusive and inconvenient to undergo a DBS check. But the purpose of the check is to enforce disclosure of (part of) your criminal record to a prospective employer or similar. It is up to that person to decide what, if anything, to do with the information so disclosed. Responsibility for the decision to employ or not employ you as a result of the check remains entirely with the employer.
A simplistic reliance on DBS, of the form “No record yes, any record no” for example, is risk avoidance, not risk management, and poor practice on the part of the employer.
Moses had to serve decades of penance in the desert, and have a mind-blowing direct experience of God, before he was considered fit to be a leader. David hadn’t killed anyone, as far as we’re told, before being selected for kingship. He later killed people in battle, which is not the same as murder; and when, much later, power and lust went to his head and he plotted to have Uriah killed, he was severely punished for his sin. Paul never murdered anyone in the sense we understand the term. He had Christians persecuted and killed, but he did it according to the legal processes of the time and Old Testament precepts. And he, like Moses, had a direct encounter with God which broke him, and apparently led to a lifelong problem with his eyes, before being thoroughly reformed.
People can be redeemed and reformed, and there are a few clergy who have a criminal conviction in their past. Jonathan Aitken is a notable example.
But we are right to be cautious about putting temptation in the way of those who have a known weakness. The Sargeant case in London Diocese is an example of someone with a previous conviction (for fraud, I think), who was later trusted to handle large sums of money without checks and balances. Result: a charity lost over £5 million and Sargeant is now behind bars.
Paedophiles are known to be highly manipulative and almost impossible to reform. It makes absolute sense to try to keep children safe from them. It’s worth the price of enduring a little personal convenience if it will save even one child from a lifetime of misery.
Indeed, Janet. And, David, the checks are to hopefully protect people from abuse! That’s important!
Thanks all. Good to reflect on these matters. My point is that when stooping down to lift people up from the dust heap (Psalm 113) God does not flinch from anybody (note the strong negative in John 6:37). Personally, I would rather take risks with former offenders than not. What is five million pounds anyway? It’s only money. God owns the galaxies.
Let’s follow David into the cave of Adullam and surround ourselves with misfits and deperadoes who want to find God. That’s my idea of a church.
David, there’s a difference between welcoming ex-offenders, and exposing people with a known weakness to further serious temptation. That is actually an unloving thing to do, since it runs a serious risk of harm to themselves and others.
I’ve been vicar of a very troubled overspill estate, and we had all sorts. In fact I’d rather work with rough diamonds than with the comfortable middle classes, because they’re often more direct and don’t pretend to be what they aren’t. All were welcome, but I wouldn’t allow all to work with children, or all to bank the collection.
Thanks Janet. Sounds wise. It’s not a good idea to give alcohol to a person with an alcohol problem, granted, but what I have difficulty is driving people away because they are less than perfect in the name of safety. If we must have a slogan, rather than safety first I think safety last would be better. I’m not keen on slogans at all, personally.
Janet, The Sargeant case is incredibly complex! There are two current, and hotly debated, threads about it on ‘Thinking Anglicans’. The previous conviction in 1995 was for 19 counts of theft, not fraud (fraud is a different offence, carrying greater sentencing powers to the court). The sentence was imprisonment for 21 months which, frankly, does not reflect a particularly serious crime. Under the Rehabilitation of Offenders Act that conviction was ‘spent’ by 2005. From that date it would not appear in a DBS check (other, more serious, offences such as child abuse would, of course).
The C of E is carrying out an investigation into the circumstances of the £5.2 million fraud by independent forensic accountants. That obviously involves, among other factors, consideration of his appointment and authority, as well as monitoring and audit thereafter. There could also well be grounds for action by the Charity Commission. The C of E is bound to report the findings of the investigation to the Commission.
I think all that can, or should, be said on a public website is that Martin Sargeant perpetrated a fraud on a considerable scale with considerable skill in covering his tracks. We should now leave it to the authorities to establish exactly how he managed this, and to say how they intend to prevent anything similar happening in the future.
I don’t believe it is complicated. He stole money from the Church by manipulating clergy with bribes and other favours. Some of those and others were people who knew perfectly well how to safeguard assets, but looked the other way instead.
In financial terms and in other ways, such as safeguarding, the Church is deliberately structured to obscure and delay proper scrutiny and process. All these obfuscations are well understood in other areas of life. The theft would be considered trivial to those in power in comparison to the total wealth they control. They only thing they don’t like is public scrutiny. May I tactfully suggest such public exposure is continued at all costs.
My goodness, Steve, those are bold assertions unless, of course, you have inside knowledge denied to the rest of us. I’m the last person to condone any kind of cover-up, but this requires detailed forensic investigation, not off the cuff remarks. I have no doubt that the CPS has done the necessary work in order to be able to bring the prosecution, but that material is not available to us and we haven’t heard any detailed evidence as Sargeant pleaded guilty. Doing so usually mitigates the expected sentence to an extent. I’m quite sure that people will be looking for the Church’s response to the forensic accountants’ investigation, and any action taken by the Charity Commission, without this case being allowed to slip under the carpet.
I think I need to add a further cautionary note. Bribery can, and does in most circumstances, amount to a criminal offence by the person being bribed and who is subject to prosecution in addition to the briber (section 2 of the Bribery Act 2010). If that happened, and one must stress if, further prosecutions will be possible. So far as I am aware, no one has yet been charged and, as I said, I’m sure the CPS will have established the facts. We can only await further developments through the proper channels.
No I’m just re-phrasing information already in the public domain.
Fraud is primarily about the grim depths of human nature, not accountancy or law. There have been plenty to study, such as Madoff or Enron.
I suppose it is possible that the accountants might provide additional data for public consumption, but unlikely. No firm would undertake such a high profile investigation without severely delimiting both the scope of their work, and its report recipients.
Good reminder about the word “bribery” and its implications.
Steve, The Fraud Act 2006 will assure you that fraud involves law, and the painful consequences of breaking the law. To suggest otherwise is living in Wonderland! You brought up the subject of bribery. It’s a very serious allegation to make and it would be potentially defamatory to mention anyone by name. I haven’t seen any hard information in the public domain: some speculation. Anyone with actual knowledge or evidence of crime should report it, not speculate in the press or on blogs or other social media.
Best wishes,
Rowland
What I’m saying is that the data will never be available to any great extent. You have to use some imagination at least to work out what is going on. We also have the canon of clergy (and others’) malfeasance to refer to. No one is mentioning any names yet.
Obviously there is a legal framework. I’m of course fully in favour of those in positions of responsibility (in particular) being reminded of it.
The official report is not due until later this year, and I understand that it will be delivered to the Diocese of London. You could be right – I hope you aren’t! – that details won’t be readily or willingly disclosed. As I repeatedly say, I’m sure that the ground has already been fully covered by the CPS. They could not have brought the fraud charge without doing so.
Rowland, you have more confidence in official processes than many of us have. Our experience is that the Establishment (whether of C of E or state – and even more so when they intertwine) protects its own. There are some highly-placed people potentially involved here, and I will be pleasantly surprised if we learn the truth about this shabby affair.
The police would have far greater access to information than the accountants will. For example the authorities can examine those who are beneficiaries of the proceeds of crime and the existence and extent of such assets. The accountants can only access the records and personnel disclosed to them by the diocese. Clever computers might give them some pointers, but basically they will have to relate to people and show such skill as they possess to extract information. I can’t imagine much disclosure particularly since the courts have already sent someone to prison. The CPS also has resource limitations, but we are never likely to find out what they know. There will be plenty of potential matter for further potential prosecution well below the threshold of being worth pursuing.
I too would be delighted to be wrong about all this
Obviously I don’t know the details, but both the Metropolitan Police and the City of London Police have specialist fraud squads, and I’m sure the CPS had the full benefit of their considerable expertise. There will be documents and an audit trail. The police know how to recover deleted IT. There’s a mass of ‘background’ documentation at Companies’ House. It may not provide any instant answers, but there are clues there.
I think you and Janet underrate the skills and expertise of people outside your own disciplines! I accept that recent ‘form’, e.g., in relation to Christ Church Oxford, justifies cynicism about the C of E’s official responses.
Whether all of the information will ever reach us is, I accept, uncertain. Doubtless that is the reason why a distinguished legal writer on TA, who sometimes also contributes here, has called for a full independent investigation. As always, we are left to ‘watch this space’.
I don’t doubt the skills and expertise of police forces in general, but there are widespread concerns about the Met and the CPS. In any case this is not about skills and expertise, but about whether those skills are employed with equal thoroughness and openness in all cases – or whether they’re instead used to protect Establishment figures.
I don’t want to prolong this ad infinitum! The police force involved, I’m sure, would be the City of London, rather than the Met. Google tells us this: “The City of London Police is the national lead police force on fraud. It provides a central resource for counter-fraud policing and runs the National Fraud Intelligence Bureau.”
I think we must wait and see, and avoid putting forward our personal theories.
Steve might enjoy exploring the Companies’ House material, but it’s more than a day’s work. I’m now pulling the plug here, as I had to on ‘Thinking Anglicans’. It’s time-consuming and exhausting work.
Richard Scorer, a solicitor with an impressive track record of tackling Church abuse, and whom I respect greatly, has posted this link about Bishop Peter Ball’s disreputable solicitor, who has now been struck off:
https://www.secularism.org.uk/news/2023/01/solicitor-struck-off-for-conflict-of-interests-in-defending-bishop