By Guy Adams For Daily Mail UK

Fit for public office? Dubbed Baroness Shameless for cosy links with evil tyrannies, the Commonwealth’s new boss is spending appalling amounts of public money self-promoting herself and chums

Baroness Scotland of Asthal is head of body that runs the Commonwealth
Labour peer added friends and political allies to organisation’s payroll
Leaked documents raise questions about whether she is fit for public office

On one of the most expensive streets in London’s Mayfair, a vast Edwardian mansion is covered in scaffolding.
For two months, passers-by have seen teams of workmen gutting the six-storey pile’s historic interior as part of a lavish make-over.
Spreadsheets detailing the project suggested that six bedrooms, four bathrooms, a ‘ladies powder room’, a kitchen, a dining room, a reception room and a ‘formal drawing room’ were to be remodelled, along with the entrance hall, staircase and four upstairs landings.
There was even talk of an enormous chandelier being fitted to illuminate the top three floors.
Such renovations are common in this street, where homeowners include a Saudi prince and an Indian billionaire, and where one property recently went on the market for £90 million.

Yet, despite appearances, the improvements are not funded by some globe-trotting plutocrat.
They are being paid for, to the tune of hundreds of thousands of pounds, by the taxpayer.
This is because The Garden House is the grace-and-favour residence of the Commonwealth’s Secretary-General, who, since April 1, has been Labour peer Baroness Scotland of Asthal.
She is head of the body that runs the Commonwealth — a voluntary association of 53 independent and equal sovereign states with a total of 2.2 billion citizens.
The Daily Mail has obtained an extraordinary tranche of leaked documents giving details of the project, which is being partly overseen by the celebrity interior designer Nicky Haslam.
The dossier shows that Baroness Scotland has added a number of personal friends and political allies to her organisation’s payroll, including PR advisers — who are being paid £16,000 a month.
The contents of the documents add to other concerns which raise serious questions about whether Baroness Scotland, a friend of Cherie Blair, is fit for public office.
For, in recent weeks, it has emerged that:
She has, controversially, hired a company owned by Lord Patel of Bradford, an old friend and fellow Labour peer, to advise on how to run the Commonwealth Secretariat, at an initial cost of £30,000 a month.
Patel’s firm is to be paid an additional £325,000 to ‘implement changes’ at the organisation.
Baroness Scotland was accused of securing her job through an ‘utterly corrupt process’ in which she allegedly awarded bogus knighthoods and made offers of charitable donations in exchange for votes.
Shortly before taking office, she made a mysterious ‘working visit’ to Kazakhstan, meeting key figures in its despotic government.
She was a paid adviser to Arcanum, a secretive Swiss-based private investigation firm which has been hired by the Kazakh regime to track down dissidents.
One of her first moves after taking office was to hold meetings with the vile dictatorship in charge of the Maldives, who have previously paid her £7,500 a day to carry out legal work.
Following her meeting with an envoy of the Maldivian dictator, it was revealed that the Commonwealth Ministerial Action Group (which deals with ‘persistent and serious violators of the Commonwealth’s shared principles’) will not be taking steps to sanction the Maldives, a member nation.
Baroness Scotland, who is required to uphold the Commonwealth Charter (whose three key principles are ‘democracy, human rights and the rule of law’) has denied all wrongdoing.
But against this weighty charge-sheet, it’s interesting that one of her first moves after taking over at the Commonwealth’s palatial offices has been to hire two PR advisers.
One is Matthew Doyle, a former Downing Street press officer who worked for her friend and mentor Tony Blair after he left office; the other is Joe Phelan, a former employee of PR firm Weber Shandwick.
The Mail has obtained copies of their employment contracts, which show they are both paid £16,000 a month.
Quite how Scotland justifies this kind of spending — at taxpayers’ expense — is anyone’s guess. After all, the Commonwealth Secretariat already has its own fully-staffed press office.
The Mail also has copies of correspondence regarding the appointment of 55-year-old Lord Patel to assist her office.
In 2012, their names were on a list of ‘glamorous personalities’ at a corporate golf tournament in India.
The following year, they were in Macedonia for the ‘inaugural Sahara Balkan Peace festival’. And, in 2014, they travelled to Bahrain as part of a Parliamentary delegation.
On April 7, a week after Scotland’s inauguration in London, Patel agreed to ‘provide strategic organisational advice’ to her.
The Commonwealth’s Code of Ethics states that ‘purchasing decisions will never be made on the basis of personal friendships’. But contrary to normal practice, Lord Patel’s appointment was never put out to tender.
What happened was that a memo dated April 1 from Gary Dunn, a senior Commonwealth staffer in charge of corporate affairs, informed Scotland that Patel’s firm could be employed only if she authorised ‘a waiver from the Secretariat’s preferred procurement practices’.
Fortunately, Dunn went on to say that the ‘key requirements’ of his job, and ‘urgency of its commencement’, meant that ‘a waiver to the usual rules is permissible’.
A spokesman for the Commonwealth insists Patel’s appointment was signed off at board level, adding that it ‘represents excellent value for money’. At £30,000 a month (plus a further £325,000)? We’ll have to take them at their word!
This wasn’t the first time Baroness Scotland’s recruitment of personal staff has generated unfortunate headlines.
In 2009, while Attorney General (the government’s chief legal officer) in Gordon Brown’s administration, she was exposed for employing an illegal immigrant from Tonga called Loloahi Tapui as a cleaner.
Despite her wealth — as Britain’s first black female QC, she has a £2 million house near the Thames in Chiswick and a cottage in the Cotswolds — the Baroness was paying Tapui a paltry £6 an hour.
Scotland was duly prosecuted for breaking immigration laws that she herself had helped draft, and fined £5,000. Her apparent lack of contrition earned her the nickname ‘Baroness Shameless’.
Fast forward to 2016. Another member of Scotland’s retinue to feature in the leaked paperwork is her sister, Hazel. On March 31, the day before Scotland started in her role, Hazel sent an email to the same Commonwealth official, Gary Dunn, describing herself as ‘Principal Private Secretary to the Secretary-General of the Commonwealth Designate’.
Subsequently, Dunn wrote a memo asking if she ought to be contacted about the renovation work on Scotland’s grace-and-favour home, The Garden House.
Does this mean Scotland’s sister is also on the payroll? Apparently not: the Commonwealth Secretariat denies that Hazel has ‘worked for the Secretary-General since her appointment’.
However, one person who is on the payroll is Lolita Applewhaite, a former diplomat from Barbados who worked on Baroness Scotland’s campaign to become Secretary-General.
In an endorsement on Scotland’s campaign website, Applewhaite stated: ‘I am not being paid to work on the campaign. I do so out of passion.’
The house was featured in a posh magazine
That was correct back then. But by early this year, she was given a prestigious job as Scotland’s chief of staff.
Her salary is unknown, but such appointments seem at odds with the fact that the Commonwealth, which has an annual budget of around £16 million, is in a financial hole.
The organisation is funded by the governments of all Commonwealth nations — although wealthier countries, such as the UK, Canada and Australia, contribute the lion’s share.
Its income has been affected by Whitehall austerity. According to its last published accounts, there is a £6.7 million hole in its pension fund — a sum greater than its entire annual wage bill. In view of this, is Baroness Scotland’s recruitment spree entirely appropriate?
For its part, the Commonwealth says: ‘[According to] point 3.2 of the Commonwealth Staff Handbook, the Secretary-General has discretion on appointments to the Office of the Secretary-General.’
Meanwhile, there’s the curious business of the expensive work on The Garden House, one of the key perks of the Commonwealth Secretary-General’s £160,000-a-year job, which also comes with private healthcare and a chauffeur-driven car.
Whether all of the work is necessary is unclear. After all, Scotland could live at her Chiswick home at no extra cost to the Commonwealth.
Two years ago, The Garden House was considered sufficiently smart to feature in the prestigious House & Home supplement of the Financial Times, which swooned about its grand drawing room ‘furnished in restrained creams and beige’.
But in the world of high-end interiors, there is nothing that can’t be improved — at a cost. And so, the Mayfair home is being completely re-modelled.
The project was approved last year — before Scotland took office — with a budget of £230,000. Costs soon spiralled, however.
By February, it was pushing £25,000 over budget. And that was before work had even begun.
Then she brought in the designer Nicky Haslam, who offered advice as a favour and is not being paid by the Commonwealth. Famously flamboyant, Haslam once wrote a memoir called Sheer Opulence.
He recommended a raft of changes, such as replacing Dulux paint with luxury brands Farrow & Ball and Edward Bulmer. This alone would have added £33,000 to the budget.
After Haslam’s visit, there was a request for an extra £5,000 for a ‘vanity unit’ in Scotland’s ‘powder room’, and £7,000 to upgrade carpets to ‘top of the range’.
Altogether, these proposed changes added £139,536 to costs, before VAT, professional fees and contingency costs were added.
By May, an increased budget of £450,000 — almost double the original — was being discussed by worried Commonwealth staffers.
Leaked emails and spreadsheets show that a significant amount of this extra money would be needed for a new bathroom for the 60-year-old baroness.
‘The SG’s [Secretary-General’s] priorities are: the paint, wallpaper and carpets and the extended reception area,’ reads an email sent between two senior Commonwealth staffers who seem shocked at the profligacy.
‘Next is the SG’s bathroom. The SG wants her bathroom completely done… I [have] advised that we [are] already over budget’.
The £450,000 figure didn’t include electrical work and at least one ‘very expensive’ new chandelier. Together, that was provisionally estimated to add another £75,000 [plus VAT].
The Commonwealth refuses to say how much it is spending, and it is unclear how much of the work discussed in the emails is going ahead.
Indeed, corporate head Gary Dunn emailed colleagues on May 5, warning that the Commonwealth could not afford some of the lavish decorations.
‘Some requests are extremely expensive such as the chandelier, replacing all the curtains, new lighting, new electrical outlets … and we do not have the funds,’ he said.
On May 13, Dunn sent a more detailed memo. It said: ‘The additional works, plus the bathroom, will increase the total cost for the refurbishment from the original £230,000 to near £450,000.’
That was more than two months ago. So what is now being spent on the building project? It’s impossible to say.
Her designer suggested luxury brand paints
‘The budget was agreed prior to the Secretary-General taking office, and no increase in that budget has been authorised or agreed by the Secretary-General,’ a Commonwealth spokesman claims.
Maybe not. But the May 13 memo suggests that Scotland may not have needed to ‘authorise or approve’ anything, since the Commonwealth Secretariat official Gary Dunn had already been able to, as he put it, ‘find funding to cover most of the indicative increased costs’.
Whatever has been spent, will, one presumes, eventually figure in the Secretariat’s accounts. But there is no sign when that will be.
Two months ago, Paul Hammersley, the Commonwealth’s head of facilities, emailed finance chief Kimberley Cliff about proposed refurbishment.
‘As there are no spare funds for 2016/7, this request would require us going further into reserves or cutting programme expenditure,’ she responded, adding that ‘our suggestion is that £150k of the Commonwealth’s 2015/16 contingency is designated for use on Hill Street [The Garden House] in 2016/7.’
Asked for more detail, the Commonwealth would say only: ‘The Secretary-General has made clear that any work on Hill Street must represent value for money and no extravagance.’
A noble ambition. However, behind the bluster, it would appear that when Baroness Shameless spends other people’s cash, her idea of value for money is far removed from that of ordinary, hard-working taxpayers.

HUMAN RIGHTS LAWYER IN BED WITH ABUSERS OF HUMAN RIGHTS
According to its charter, the Commonwealth exists to uphold ‘democracy, human rights and the rule of law’.
Little wonder, therefore, that Baroness Scotland was accused of an ‘outrageous conflict of interests’ after the Mail revealed her financial links to two of the world’s most notoriously corrupt and despotic dictatorships: Kazakhstan and the Maldives.
In 2012, she was hired to provide legal advice to the regime of Abdulla Yameen, the dictator of the Maldives, whose associates had recently seized power in a coup.
A contract leaked to this newspaper revealed Scotland was paid £75,000 for ten days of work, plus another £50,000 that was signed off (in breach of the country’s laws) by Azima Shukoor, its Attorney General.
Her job was intended to prevent the regime being censured by the Commonwealth.
Over the ensuing years, Scotland also sat on the advisory board of her friend Cherie Blair’s law firm Omnia, which the Mail has revealed has earned £2,000 a day working for the dictatorship.
This year, Azima Shukoor (now Yameen’s special envoy) was one of the first people whom Baroness Scotland met in her capacity as Commonwealth Secretary-General.
The Mail has also revealed that she visited Kazakhstan in February for what was opaquely described as a ‘working visit’, in which she held meetings with key figures in its despotic regime.
Intriguingly, Scotland had for most of the previous year maintained a working relationship with Arcanum, a secretive private investigation firm which has been hired to help the Kazakh government track dissidents.
The country is condemned by human rights campaigners, who say there is ‘impunity for torture’ and where ‘freedoms of expression, association and peaceful assembly continue to be restricted’.
The Baroness vigorously denied working for Arcanum on the February visit. However, the firm issued a written statement claiming that she had used it to hold ‘a number of meetings on behalf of Arcanum’.
After the Mail queried the discrepancy, Arcanum changed its story to say that the previous statement had been issued in error.

IMAGES:
Labour peer Baroness Scotland of Asthal
Tough questions: Baroness Scotland being received by the Queen on her appointment as Commonwealth Secretary-General
The dossier shows that Baroness Scotland has added a number of personal friends and political allies to her organisation¿s payroll, including PR advisers ¿ who are being paid £16,000 a month
Baroness Scotland is head of the body that runs the Commonwealth ¿ a voluntary association of 53 independent and equal sovereign states with a total of 2.2 billion citizens

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