The Conservative party chairman Grant Shapps
is facing legal action from a constituent following the emergence of
audio evidence that revealed, contrary to his public statements, that he
carried on using the business pseudonym Michael Green while an MP.
Dean Archer was pursued by the politician’s lawyers after he
published a Facebook posting mocking Shapps’ use of a business pen name
and suggesting that he did so after he had been elected to parliament.
Until last week, when he was presented with new audio evidence,
Shapps had rejected claims that he had carried on under the guise of
Michael Green while an MP. He has now admitted that he had “over-firmly
denied” that claim. In a statement to the Observer, Archer, a chauffeur and former Labour councillor, said that he was now consulting his own lawyers.
It is understood that any legal action against the Tory chairman
would proceed on the basis that Shapps owes Archer personal damages.
Archer said: “I have been bullied and threatened with legal action based
on a falsehood. Now I will take action of my own. I am taking legal
advice and will be writing to Grant Shapps and his lawyers to demand
that they explain the action they took. Did Grant Shapps mislead his own
legal counsel?
“It is incredible that Mr Shapps has ignored my calls for an
in-person apology, and it is shocking that David Cameron has taken no
action against this wrongdoing on his watch.”
In response to the development, a Conservative party spokesman said:
“Dean Archer is a failed Labour councillor who was forced to resign from
public office. He wrote comments, which were indeed defamatory,
accepted this and volunteered to remove them.
“The party chairman’s interests in his family business were all
properly declared to parliament: any suggestion otherwise is defamatory,
and malicious, and will be treated as such.
“Like a number of Guardian/Observer journalists, the party chairman occasionally published under a pen name. This has all been exhaustively reported before.”
Advertisement
Archer
was a Labour councillor until September 2013 when he was disqualified
for not attending a council meeting during the previous six months. He
has blamed his attendance record on the anti-social hours he works as a
driver.
In his Facebook posting, Archer had noted that Shapps had called
fellow MP Mark Reckless “a liar” for defecting to Ukip. Archer went on
to question how honest Shapps had been when he had previously appeared
as online marketeer “Mr Green”.
In response, letters from the MP’s lawyers, sent last October and
November, demanded that Archer retract what was described as a
“defamatory allegation” and offer “proposals for compensating our client
in lieu of damages and [an] undertaking to indemnify our client in full
for his legal costs”.
However, after the story broke about the existence of the audio
evidence, Shapps admitted that he had “screwed up” on the dates and
therefore incorrectly denied working as Green while he was in
Westminster.
In the recording from the summer of 2006 he boasts that his products could make listeners a “ton of cash by Christmas”.
In Archer’s statement to the Observer, he said his wife was
particularly upset by the Tory chairman’s reaction to the Facebook
posting. Archer said: “The response from Mr Shapps was both shocking and
genuinely scary. A letter appeared from a high-powered law firm, Hill
Dickinson, saying I had libelled Mr Shapps and asked me for damages to
be paid to Mr Shapps unless I wanted to end up in court.
“My wife in particular was really very upset. After I contacted Mr
Shapps’ solicitors they suggested a form of wording that would be
acceptable to him, in return for which he would not sue me. The wording
said: “[Mr Shapps] openly published his full name alongside business
publications making it clear that he used a pen name merely to separate
business and politics, prior to entering Parliament.
“This is something Mr Shapps has said repeatedly. Just a few weeks
ago he told LBC’s listeners three times in response to questions that he
had stopped calling himself Michael Green and working for How To Corp
Ltd when he became an MP, although he remained a director and
shareholder. He has said so again and again.
“So you can imagine how furious I was when I saw the Guardian
had found a tape of him a year after being elected – the summer of 2006
– talking about his work, saying he’d spent ages researching products
and was launching new products soon – products that indeed did launch
after the tape was recorded.”
The prime minister has defended Shapps while the health secretary Jeremy Hunt attacked Labour, the Guardian
and the BBC, who reported the story, for an “attack” on Shapps. He
tweeted: “His sin not 2 use pseudonym but 2 write books about how 2
create wealth – shock horror.”
copy http://www.theguardian.com/
Nenhum comentário:
Postar um comentário