I can’t expect all the readers of this blog to know its background, so here’s a quick recap.
1. In addition to numerous benefits and privileges, closed contracts and state pension arrangements, the British Council gets a daily (i.e. 365) subvention from the taxpayer which is a substantial multiple of my annual turnover. That means competition from them with me, or with any other genuine enterprise (whether at home or abroad), can never be fair.
2. So I shouldn’t have gone into competition with them? It was of course the British Council who chose to marshal its state-endowed advantages and use them to go into direct competition with me. In 2001 my enterprise was already 13 years old, and the company's position as market leader was established.
3. In that year the British Council had a cooperative agreement (1998-2003) with my company. This included a contractual obligation to support our publications with their “best endeavours”. At this time we were meeting the full cost, and risk, of supplying the British Council with printed guides and CDs (we supplied altogether about 1 million products worldwide), and our offline database was installed on all British Council computers worldwide.
4. Over and above the points in (1), but in order further to ensure that the playing field would now be tilted at a sharper angle in their favour, the British Council
- signed a competing contract in which it had a financial interest
- obtained my signature on a waiver without revealing this key fact
- appointed the same managers, with whom I was obliged to liaise for the purposes of our cooperative agreement, to oversee the development of a direct competitor to our product
- seriously misrepresented their own contractual arrangements to the public in general, and specifically and deliberately to my client base in particular. Well OK, they lied.
5. When it was clear (in 2004) that I would not shut up (and had written to Charles Clarke, at that time Secretary of State for Education), the British Council (actually the Director-General David Green) unilaterally and secretly instigated an “investigation” which involved internal contact with only the managers referred to in (4) above. It then used this non-investigation as a basis for rejecting any further enquiry by any person, with the formula that there was “no basis for (my) claims”.
6. In 2005 when I made a related FoI enquiry to the British Council concerning whether there had been any variations or amendments to the British Council’s 2001 contract with (£100 company) Education Websites Ltd, I was told there were none. In fact the contract had been switched to Sheffield Data Services Ltd (which strikes me as a pretty significant amendment, and at the very least a reason for not saying no variation or amendment). In March 2005 Education Websites Ltd swapped names with a new company called Remone Ltd and an application was made to Companies House to have Remone Ltd (i.e. the original British Council contractor from 2001) struck from the record. Now why would they do that?
7. Because what took place in 2004 was a deliberate stitchup and in no sense an investigation, my quest for truth and justice has necessarily continued. Truth and justice remain concepts which the British Council struggles with, however, and in a later blog we shall look at why, and what needs to be done about it.
